


Newtype

by Asuka Kureru (Askerian)



Series: Newtype [2]
Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Body Horror, F/M, M/M, Multi, Psychic Abilities
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-11-23
Updated: 2012-11-01
Packaged: 2017-10-26 11:26:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/282493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Is ex-Gundam Pilot Duo Maxwell behind those heists and murders? Preventers Chang and Yuy want to find out, but the backlash from the Newtypes' coming out throws a wrench in their investigation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Just in case: Newtypes are a concept that comes up a lot in other Gundam series. Basically, as an adaptation to living in Space, human beings started developing psychic gifts such as telepathy, prescience, "heightened awareness" (whatever that means), and the like. There are hints in Gundam Wing that make it look like the writers were possibly considering the idea of going that way; in the end they chose not to, but it's still fun to play with.

**Prologue: AC 194**

 **  
**

"Hm. Minimal brain activity..."

"What do you mean, 'minimal'? I thought she was _dead_. If she isn't --"

"She _is_ , sir, she is. Those are only neurons firing off at random. We're going to keep the body on life support; there's no telling how long the brain activity will last and the organs will probably fail again."

"Are you absolutely, _absolutely_ surethere is no chance she might wake up? You know who she was. The only reason you are allowed to have the body--"

"She was pronounced dead on arrival, sir, and I've seen nothing to tell me otherwise. Penetrative trauma in the abdomen, internal hemorrhaging leading to heart failure, persistent vegetative state..."

"But your machines say she isn't brain-dead."

"... Sir... It doesn't mean anything. She might as well be. With that level of brain activity, and only in those areas, look -- there isn't anyone in here anymore. We're just preventing the body from rotting... I'm sorry."

"Ah... She chose her death, and chose it well. And through her sacrifice, we have found a new hope for this colony..."

"You may choose to see that she serves another hope now, sir. Her strength will go on--"

"You don't need to sell the project to _me_."

"Heh. My apologies."

"Accepted. I won't waste any more of your time, Doctor. You have an operation to prepare, and I have a funeral to see to."

"Of course, sir. I'll send you a report as soon as we're done here."

"See that you do."

"Well, then. Wheel her in, Huang. Is the operating room ready?"

\--

 **Chapter 1: Five years later -- AC 199, June 12 th**   
__

_NEWTYPE GENES DISCOVERED!_

 _Newtypes exist -- and now Science can prove it!_

 _Researchers at L1 Jonathan Matheson Institute discovered a correlation between a particular sequence of genes on chromosomes 11 and 17 and the ability of test subjects to accurately predict unseen symbols on cards._

 _Test subjects were selected from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the L1, L3 and L4 colony clusters, ranging from age 25 to age 40. Earthborn and first-generation colonists were unable to accurately predict the symbols. In one out of ten second-generation colonists, accuracy rose by eight to fifteen percent. Of the third-generation colonists, more than one-fifth has 60 to 70 percent accuracy._

 _Test subjects who scored well outside normal parameters were all found to exhibit segments of this particular genetic sequence. The sequence was only found in three out of over 1500 subjects who only achieved an average or below-average score._

 _Similar genetic sequences are suspected to be linked to test subjects' ability to anticipate movement, perceive emotional states, and locate hidden objects._

 _There was no significant difference in results based on age, gender, or level of education._

 _\----_

"Catching up on the news?"

Wufei peered over the edge of his screen, taking in the empty Preventers computer lab, with half its ceiling lights turned off and layers upon layers of yellowing memos stuck to the walls. Heero Yuy was navigating the rows of tables and computers to join him. It was getting late, but somehow Wufei wasn't surprised to see his on-and-off partner still in the building. They were both workaholics.

"I feel like I'm reading a tabloid," he grouched, glaring at the related articles with disgust.

It wasn't even the very existence of abilities slightly outside of what people considered possible -- he practiced martial arts, he knew what a true master could do that would seem impossible to a random civilian. It was surprising to discover another unexplored depth to humankind -- strange, even -- but it wasn't going to make his world view crumble. No, it was the tone. _A New Type of Man : Salvation or Downfall? -- Humans In Space Reach New Frontier! -- Mutants In Your Children's Schools! -- The Newtype Conspiracy : What The_ _Alliance_ _Hid!_ _\-- You Might Be A Newtype IF..._

Heero leaned a hip against Wufei's desk, checked the open tabs on his browser, and grunted in assent. "You haven't watched live news yet. Or talk shows."

Wufei groaned. He hadn't yet fully recuperated from his two-months-long undercover mission, but he had a feeling the situation would have given him anticipatory exhaustion even if he'd been perfectly well-rested. For a second he almost regretted the jungle and its angry guerilleros. They had been fairly uncomplicated, in their own casually violent way.

"Let me guess," he said, giving Heero a cynical look. "Paranoia, accusations of sinister government plots, vindicated crackpots, people accusing the government of not doing anything but not even agreeing on what they want it to do, and more paranoia."

"And a new church that refers to newtypes as 'enlightened beings' and sees it as, I quote, 'a sign that God is fine-tuning His Children'."

Wufei massaged the bridge of his nose. This was starting well. "Any riots?"

"No," Heero answered in a way that meant 'not yet'. "The population of colonists on Earth is minimal, and on many colonies it was already a persistent urban legend; they're not as shocked."

Wufei arched an eyebrow. "People are being reasonable? I'm surprised."

Heero gave him a sarcastic quirk of the eyebrow. "An executive at Meyers Industries in Deutschland pushed a colleague out of a window, justifying it with the excuse that the victim stole a promotion from him via psychic espionage and sabotaging."

"... I... See." Wufei's lips twisted sourly. "Jailed?" he asked for confirmation. He wouldn't be too badly surprised if some radical judge with an agenda had kept the man out of prison with half-baked extenuating circumstances.

"Murder is murder," Heero commented neutrally, in a way that made Wufei brace for whatever was coming next. "...Someone at the morgue took it upon themselves to leak an unauthorized test that reveals the victim did present the NT-genes."

Wufei's fingers went back to massaging the bridge of his nose. The trial was going to be messy.

"Family's been sent back to L4 due to vandalism and harassment. It isn't the only isolated incident that links back to newtypes, but so far it's the only public one where the presence of the NT-genes was a hundred percent confirmed."

Wufei snorted. Finding a lab that could and would do unauthorized genetic testing wasn't exactly easy, but he would be surprised if there were no more forceful outings before the end of the month. "What a charming mess," he commented, voice thick with sarcasm and disappointment in his fellow man. "I'm glad it's not mine to clean up."

Heero gave a faint smirk. "Actually..."

"It _better_ not be," Wufei growled threateningly.

Heero's smirk vanished as if it had never been. Wufei gave him a suspicious frown, but the young man only responded with a blank look, as if he had no clue what Wufei looked displeased about. "The two of us are to follow up on the leads you unearthed during your undercover stint."

"You're an ass, Yuy," Wufei muttered; when Heero arched an eyebrow at him, as if daring him to repeat, he just glared tiredly, and then allowed himself to smile a bit. He might, perhaps, in the middle of the guerilleros' crude locker-room jokes and merciless ridicule, have missed Yuy's elusive brand of stealth teasing a bit.

"Is there anything else in the news I need to know?"

Heero leaned toward the screen and quickly scanned the browser history to get a better idea of what Wufei had already gone over. "Hm. Unless you're interested in animals rights activists or divorce scandals amongst the jet-set, no."

"Good." Wufei closed the windows and turned the computer off, and pulled himself out of his chair. His legs were stiff; he pretended they weren't, but from Heero's vaguely amused air, he didn't manage to hide it completely. The time for friendly jabs was past, though. He gave his assigned partner a somber look. "Go get your files and follow me home."

He didn't need to say anything more. "Understood," Heero retorted sharply, all traces of amusement melting out of his eyes; three seconds later, he was striding out of the computer lab without looking back.

Wufei gathered his belongings and went to sign out.

His reports on the activity of the Chinese guerilla and the numerous Triads involved in keeping it going had been detailed, and he had left no hard fact out of them. But there were still conjectures and strange correlations to other cases that he and Heero were still reluctant to make official.

Things that seemed almost -- even entirely -- irrelevant, until you put together several affairs that shouldn't have had much of a direct connection, and started to get the first hints of a pattern. A pattern that wouldn't have meant much to a lot of people, but that meant a lot to a Gundam pilot.

It wasn't like Quatre Winner really needed to add a "crime lord" feather to his multinational cap, and there weren't that many other possibilities left.

+

"... Too grainy to prove anything." Heero let out a short sigh and reclined in Wufei's couch, eyebrows furrowed. On Wufei, the expression would have looked frustrated and angry; on Heero, it just looked intensely thoughtful.

Wufei massaged the bridge of his nose and glared tiredly at the many reports, both official and personal, that spilled their guts over the coffee table and piled up here and there on his hardwood floor.

"Okay. A last time." Heero took a white sheet of paper and a pencil, traced a few quick lines, and gave it to Wufei. "The clearing where your Kirin Brigade and Bei Long's men were supposed to meet. Do you remember the relief?"

The Kirin brigade. Hah. Grand name for a bunch of bloodthirsty idiots who rebelled because the Eve wars hadn't landed them as the ruling class of their own little country and clearly that was just plain unfair and to be corrected. But they wouldn't go free much longer... Shaking his head, Wufei shaded the rocky areas and fixed the line of the forest.

"Front half of Bei Long's car," he pointed out on the crude map. "Back half. His men's car. Tracks of the missing munitions truck. Mobile Suit transport truck, two-seater, one Leo aboard, destroyed." He closed his eyes briefly to concentrate. "Scuff marks on the rocks here..."

"The other Leo wasn't on the transport when it was attacked..."

"Not that it did them much good." Wufei glanced at the video, where the five relevant seconds played in a loop. No sound, just an image so damaged it was little more than black and white pixels and a lot of static. A still picture of a forest, the back end of a car... and then the image whirled to the left, sweeping over empty grass and rocks. The last half-second had the camera starting to pan up -- then static.

The attacking Mobile Suit had taken them a while to identify from the cleanest still-picture they had; it only showed its leg. It was a Horseman, a weaponless Suit that was used, amongst other things, to clean up mountainsides of unstable rocks and fallen trees. It was a relatively light model, maybe half as big as a Gundam; so-called because it came with a four-wheeled "ride" of sorts for long distances, but that hadn't been used there. It could climb and stand on sharp inclines, but couldn't hover over flat ground more than ten seconds at a time and its operating system was very limited. And its hands were more adapted to moving around tree trunks than holding weapons.

Wufei was sure he could have found more clues, but the Kirin commander had been so panicked to see his promised weapons gone and the fearsome mafia who furnished them destroyed that Wufei barely got the time to download a copy of the Leo' recent memory before the guerilleros retreated hastily and he was forced to follow. They hadn't even checked for survivors. Wufei had sent a message to the authorities as soon as he could do it without blowing his cover, but the first occasion only came two days later; by then the field had been burned down and all clues destroyed.

"So the Horseman jumps on the patrolling Leo..." Heero continued, patient.

"... Must have kicked right through the cockpit on the first try. Then... No footprint in between, at least sixty feet... It kicks off straight from the falling Leo and uses its hoverjets to push itself farther. Lands on the first car. Boss gets flattened, one man manages to exit in time..."

"Ah?"

"No body in the shotgun seat, and the door was open," Wufei pointed out.

"Hm. Possible, unless the impact did it. If there was someone, he escaped."

Wufei sighed, irritated. "Another potential witness. Now how the hell we're going to find out if he even exists, I don't know."

Heero snorted quietly. "Maybe the Chinese police will get lucky and think to call us. Anyway...?"

"Kicks clean through the Mobile Suit transport cabin, disabling the vehicle. Then the tracks, hmm -- ah, I get it. The second car tries to ram its leg and it jumps up to dodge, and lands on the leftover Leo, the unmanned one that was still laying on the truck. Straight on the cockpit, once again -- and it must have landed pretty hard."

Heero leaned back and scowled heavily. "Someone good enough to kick off from a stumbling target and clear this much space with a Horseman already has to be good. But a Horseman's structure is weaker and the metals are thinner than a battle model -- to go through a Leo's plating it _had_ to land hard, but then it would have gotten damaged on impact."

Wufei shrugged. "Doesn't matter, it didn't have to go far."

"I mostly meant that the balance on landing must have been perfect, or the knee joints would have broken and the Horseman crashed -- and you would have seen tracks for that. Were there?"

Wufei shook his head no; the only tracks in the high grass and soft earth had been people running away on foot.

"Twice. That's more than 'good'," Heero said quietly. "That's either elite or insanely lucky."

"... Mmh." Wufei stared down at his notes. That... really wasn't helping disprove their main theory. "The rest of the men escape, the pilot lays the Horseman on top of the munitions truck and drives off. The end." He closed his eyes briefly. "... And between Bei Long's latest 'all clear' and our arrival at the site, not ten minutes went by. The attacker was well out of sight by then. I don't think it took that operative longer than two minutes to clear the area of targets. Maybe under one thirty."

"Hm." Heero picked up his notebook. "So what did we learn?"

Wufei tilted his head to read Heero's list. _1) Suspect knew where &when money/weapons exchange would happen. Someone talked? Check for bugs. 2) Suspect piloted a Horseman. (very common model -- track sales/theft anyway.) 2b) Suspect is extremely good with Horseman. Experience? What kind; training, battlefield? 2c) Horseman's operating system was rewritten for speed&efficiency. (Who has the skills? Who would sell the knowledge?)_

"I find it strange the assailant ran off with the munitions but didn't try to capture the unmanned Leo on the transport. Even a junk-heap rescue like that one was still valuable. Selling it would have bought him a lot more weapons than stealing the ones in the truck, unless there was something in there the Kirin commander didn't mention." Wufei would have been surprised if there was. The man had an almost pathological need to brag. Oh, he could have kept his mouth shut, but he would still have exuded smugness of the 'I know something you don't' variety. He hadn't.

"Maybe our suspect wanted the weapons right away, or wouldn't have known who to sell the Leo to," Heero said.

"Hm. Anyway... Amongst all incidents, it's the only one where a Mobile Suit was used. The previous operative could have hired someone or been assigned a partner -- or the mobile suit attack is entirely unrelated to our bigger case. But when you consider the timing with the attack on the rest of Bei Long's Family, and the fact that the weapons stolen were in all likelihood used on them..."

"Could be unrelated, but it doesn't feel that way," Heero agreed quietly. "No, it's the same person."

"Or group."

Heero grunted, clearly unconvinced. Wufei was in agreement. So far there was nothing to prove there were several people involved together in this -- but then again, nothing proved there was one culprit to everything either. Motives were still lacking; what on Earth was it about? Vendetta? Vigilantism? Mafia group mowing down the competition? Groundwork to a coup d'état? Separately Heero and Wufei could easily find number-one suspects and motives for a lot of the crimes -- mafias were always at war, politicians could either be dirty or know someone else who was, and laboratories, well, it went from industrial espionage to coworker jealousy -- but only if all the cases also happened to be strangely similar by pure coincidence. No motive fit for every suspect party.

They'd tried starting from the other end -- the method -- and track back up to the source. They already had a couple of possible suspects for that one, someone who would have known how and been physically able to carry on dozens of separate incidents in a row. A motive, now, that was less immediately obvious.

The short bit of surveillance footage Wufei had managed to salvage wouldn't work as proof of anything, but it troubled him nonetheless.

"So our hacker-heist-hitman operative might also be a highly competent pilot." Wufei frowned, flipping through several of the files again, eyes automatically pausing on the key points. A semi-common, but awfully convenient computer anomaly here, an unusual break-in pattern there, an odd bit of timing in that one... "When the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems start to resemble nails," he quoted under his breath.

"You think we're over-identifying with the pattern?"

"It's a possibility," Wufei allowed halfheartedly. "... That, or we're just refusing to let go of the idea that there even _is_ a pattern because suspecting our own is better than not having any clue where to start."

The two young men exchanged a long look.

"What if you drop the idea that our suspect is the pilot?" Wufei asked, unwilling to explore the possibility before having exhausted all others.

"Three of the disappearances have occurred on De Montaubois turf, and two of the businesses hits have ties that might lead back to their rivals, the Estevez."

Wufei nodded with fake patience, giving Heero a jaded look. "Just a problem. They're all dead."

"Not Raquel Estevez."

"... Isn't that the grandmother? She's over ninety."

"She could be advising or paying other people," Heero commented even as he typed in a search string.

Wufei allowed it halfheartedly. "She could..."

"She couldn't," Heero rectified with a scowl.

"Hm?"

"Alzheimer's. Advanced case."

Wufei groaned in weary acknowledgement and reclined against the back of the couch, holding the file he'd been reading closed on his lap. He wasn't even surprised. He made a mental note to send someone to check anyway, in the unlikely case she was faking it or paying her doctors to lie. "Estevez had a second in command, didn't he?"

"Who's also dead."

"He had a son."

"Changed his name and cut all family ties over ten years ago; now he's a supervisor at McDonald's."

Wufei let his head drop heavily on the backrest and closed his eyes. "Might want revenge anyway. Add him to the background check list."

He listened to Heero's soft grunt of acknowledgement and the clacking of his keyboard, wishing nothing more than to be allowed to go to bed. He'd been up for almost twenty-three hours; and in six hours they'd have to clock in at work, but there were some things they just couldn't talk about in the Preventers building. Too much of a chance of being overheard by the wrong person. The Preventers were a fine group, but they were also a highly paranoid one, and their Internal Affairs department would have fits over the amount of information Wufei and Heero hadn't seen fit to share.

Heero gave them fits often enough, with his so-called part-time status. Just came and went as he pleased, really; here in time for some big case, and then gone as soon as the report was typed.

Oh, he wasn't the only part-timer on the Preventer payroll, far from it, and it would have been fine if the rest of the time he worked as a bodyguard or a shuttle repairman, or, hell, even a _cashier_ \-- something traceable. He could even go laze about in a spa every other week for all they cared, so long as he could be found when they looked for him. But usually he just dropped off the radar. Even Wufei didn't know where he went and why. Add that to his ex-Gundam pilot status...

Heero and Wufei's wartime occupation was on a need-to-know basis, which meant people had gossiped about it at the coffee machine until something scandalous happened to some other coworker and drove it out of many minds. The Preventers organization was comprised of just about everything -- ex-OZ, ex-Romafeller, ex-freedom fighters from all parts of the Earth sphere, ex-nonpartisan civilians. Gundam pilots fit neatly in the ex-freedom fighter corner -- and seeing them day in, day out had made most of the colleagues they didn't directly work with forget how competent, driven and dangerous they truly had been. To many they were just Resistance Mobile Suit pilots, who'd lucked out on the machines they happened to get their hands on. Quite competent, but nothing to ooh and aah about.

Not all of their coworkers thought like that, though. And Wufei knew that some higher-ups firmly believed Heero only used the Preventers as a convenient resource for his own personal ends, and they just hadn't caught him red-handed yet.

It wasn't so far from the truth; they were just lucky Heero's goal was the same as the organization's. The day working for the Preventers stopped being convenient, Wufei knew Heero would hand in his notice and revert back to solo work without a second thought. His loyalty wasn't to a government or an organization, and it wasn't going to be bought with a paycheck.

Sometimes Wufei was tempted to apply for part-time status, too. But for maximum efficiency, Heero needed a full-time, trustworthy partner onboard, and Sally and Noin had other responsibilities.

"About that computer error... I think there was another case where it could have been used... Something in Australia? No deaths, but --"

"That was me," Heero replied laconically.

"Oh."

Wufei groaned and massaged his temples. He refused to ask.

"...I need more coffee."

But of course there wasn't any coffee left. There hadn't been any for the last hour and a half. Wufei really needed to restock.

He forced himself to open the folders on his lap again, skimming through them with the weak hope that something new would jump at him. Pharmaceutical firm thoroughly bombed, research irretrievable, all employee houses broken into and searched for copies; up-and-coming mafia hotshot disappeared in transit between two L3 sub-colonies; big-time, loud-mouthed L2 politician suddenly deciding to take a long vacation on Earth...

"Hah. 'Politician' on L2 is just a fancy word for 'mafia lord that cops have to shake hands with'," Wufei muttered under his breath. And the lab seemed clean -- all legal paperwork had been submitted and it had never come to the attention of either the local police or the Preventers before the hit -- but drug and biological warfare research couldn't be done in a kitchen, so for all they knew...

"Hm?"

"Nothing. ...The more I look at those attacks and the less I can see anything but guerilla and advanced sabotage training. The serious kind -- this is a highly competent operative who has nerves of steel, incredible timing, and is used to blowing his way through if he can't sneak in. Add to that sharp piloting skills and possible programming and hacking skills..." Wufei paused, gave Heero a sardonic quirk of his eyebrow. "Are you sure you haven't forgotten to mention being an up-and-coming crime lord in your spare time?"

Heero quirked his own eyebrow right back. "I have spare time?"

Wufei snorted, his lips curling up in a small smile. It didn't last; he pushed the papers on the couch and extricated himself, pacing to the kitchen and back to work out the kinks in his legs.

The elephant in the room was starting to resemble a bloated whale.

He went to Heero's side of the couch, leaned back against the wall. Heero was staring at his screen, but didn't even pretend to type or scroll. Wufei watched his profile, the tense jaw, the lowered eyelashes that spoke of somber thoughts.

"All the clues go back to L2 in the end, don't they," Wufei said, because someone had to.

Heero's voice was quiet as he answered, and he didn't look up from his computer screen. "The ones that go anywhere, yes. But then it's a fairly attractive place for all kinds of shady deals. And people travel."

Trowa Barton traveled, a lot. Wufei closed his eyes. "What does your gut feeling tell you?"

A muscle in Heero's jaw twitched. "Duo."

"Aa."

Wufei massaged his temples; it didn't help. The evidence amounted to jack shit and would hold approximately ten seconds in a court of law; but if they said the name at work, it would be all the validation their coworkers needed to start a witch hunt.

Quatre had claimed to fight for peace, Wufei for justice; Trowa and Heero because they could and didn't see why not, at first -- though later on they'd gained other reasons. But Gundam Pilot 02 Duo Maxwell had fought in the name of revenge. Of course the truth was more complicated than that -- Wufei's first reason for seeking justice had nothing to do with altruism and everything to do with Romafeller killing his wife -- but it wasn't how things were remembered.

"What do we do?"

Trowa would be faster and easier to check up on. They knew where he was supposed to be. The circus would be the perfect cover; a reason to travel without even bothering with fake papers. Hiding in plain sight : his specialty. Wufei didn't put making it look like Maxwell had done it past Barton either.

Hell, they couldn't possibly know all operatives of this level in the Earth Sphere; there were probably quite a few around who had nothing to do with any Gundam Pilot.

Heero stared at the screen in silence for a few seconds. "Kamenov is based on L2. We need to investigate him first anyway."

Heh. Wufei would have reminded Heero that gut feelings got people into trouble, but he would have been a hypocrite, because his guts said the same thing. Granted, if Winner or Barton decided to put the blame on Maxwell in such a way that even his fellow Gundam pilots would believe it, they could. For that matter, so could Wufei himself, he was sure.

"We'll have a hard time getting a warrant with that flimsy evidence," he muttered. Whereas they would get one if they mentioned a Gundam pilot might have gone renegade again -- his own behavior was precedence enough, to his great shame. But then they would probably get saddled with a SWAT team or two.

"Minister Weisman is riding Une's ass. She'll give us the mission just to make it look like we're doing something. Once we're there..." Heero shrugged.

Wufei pushed away from the wall and started gathering papers. "All right. Let's ask tomorrow."

Hopefully five and a half hours of sleep would be enough to let him talk their way through.

+

The couch didn't fold out. Heero didn't care. He wasn't asleep. It was fine; he'd had a nap in the middle of the day, and he did plan on going to bed early tomorrow. He could afford it, not like Wufei whose dark rings under his eyes seemed to want to become permanent, at home with his subtly strained features.

It had startled him, when he had seen Wufei in the computer room -- he looked so drained. It bothered Heero. Wufei worked too hard, had worked too hard for months -- and Heero would have thought nothing of it if it had been necessary... It was usually more necessary than not, but Wufei seemed to look for such situations, as if he thought that if he didn't take the hardest assignments no one else would. Missions, desk work, more missions. Granted, Heero rarely took breaks, but at least half the time he was roaming around the Earth Sphere pretending to be a normal young man on his last year of freedom before college, and that meant he had to take it easy in order not to stand out.

... Heh. If someone else read and agreed with their conclusions, Duo might not be their first suspect. It was a good thing he had Une's trust.

Or they might also think Wufei and he were wasting their free time with crazy conspiracy theories. There was a reason they did most of the research and theorizing on this string of affairs at home or on their lunch breaks; any farther on the backburner and it would have fallen off their official caseload entirely.

Heero threw a glance at the futon in the far corner of the room. Wufei was a little more relaxed now that he was asleep, but not a lot. He looked old, older than his twenty years. There was a faint groove between his eyebrows.

 _'You're much too young for wrinkles,'_ Heero remembered Relena telling him, her thumb rubbing the exact same place on his face. _'Try again when you're forty.'_

He wasn't sure there was anyone to do that for Wufei -- not anyone he would listen to, anyway.

Heero wanted to try, but he wasn't sure how to make it sound like concern and not like a rebuke, how not to make Wufei think Heero assumed he wasn't good enough to deal with the stress. Their relationship had relaxed from uncomfortable allies into friendship after the Mariemeya incident, but there was still too much rivalry mixed in for Wufei to accept Heero's advice about slowing down. Duty was duty, and Heero would be the last to berate someone for giving themselves over to the protection of their ideals, but he could tell guilt and self-destructive wishes were also amongst Wufei's motives.

How strange was it, that they were close enough to fight side by side and never get in each other's way, to entrust their life to each other without a second thought, and yet not enough to allow Heero to mention Wufei's unhealthy guilt? Part of Wufei had known it was wrong to side with Mariemeya, no matter his motives; but he'd been too stubborn to drop it, had wanted to see things to their bitter end, and caused a lot of grief to a lot of people. Heero had forgiven him on that same day, never kept a grudge, but telling him so would only make Wufei clam up. It just wasn't a topic open for discussion.

The best Heero could do for him was to solve the case quickly. He closed his eyes, replaying the short clip in his mind. The Leo pilot looking back, finding nothing -- and then...

 _'Death from above!'_

He could hear it clear as yesterday.

If it was any of them, it wasn't Trowa. Trowa would have found weapons to strap onto his Mobile Suit and sniped the Mafiosi from a high vantage point, of which they were many. Duo and Quatre both would have leapt into the fray from the start, but Quatre would have used cutting weapons to disable the suit's joints. And he might have been able to crush the car with people still inside, but only if he knew for sure they were all sadistic torturers, child molesters, or the like. Granted, some Mafiosi were very bad people, but a little illegal trade wouldn't prompt Quatre to stomp anyone into the ground.

But Quatre didn't move his Mobile Suits like that.

 _'Hey, guys, betcha I can pinball through the whole battlefield without touching the ground.'_

Heero was pretty sure nothing would warp Duo badly enough that he would kill small-time crooks who were no danger to anyone, just because it was easier on him. But the second they picked up a gun, made themselves a threat, whether they meant it or whether they were just morons who hadn't thought that far, then he would be fully able to shoot them down. Because picking up a gun meant being willing to kill, and that meant if anyone else went and killed you first, well, you'd be getting nothing you hadn't offered others.

Wufei thought like that, and Trowa. Heero too, sometimes -- that if you were ready to hurt others then you had to accept the risk of being hurt right back -- but even then he would have done his very best to capture them, lead them to the police and made sure they paid their debt to society -- or, failing that, that they were thrown into a hole from where they could not damage it further. He didn't want to kill anyone again, and it wasn't because he cared about the criminals all that much; he'd learned to care about himself, that was all. He would kill people, if he had to -- but the need would have to be extraordinary. That Duo had chosen to kill those men... He didn't know.

And he was already thinking of the suspect as Duo Maxwell, even with their total lack of proof. Heero sighed quietly and reclined in the couch, staring at the ceiling. He shouldn't let himself get used to the assumption; it might make him misinterpret clues.

Heero doubted Duo would have changed that much from the war. But he didn't _know_. He still received calls from Quatre sometimes, and a year ago he'd spent a couple of days at Trowa's circus after a chance meeting in Mexico. But Duo...

Electronic tracks were easy to follow; but if you believed bank accounts and credit cards, Duo Maxwell had ceased to exist a couple of years ago.

The lease had run out on the house he shared with Hilde Schbeiker and he'd never bought or rented anywhere else -- nor had anyone looking anything like him. Heero knew. He'd looked. Oh, not that hard -- he'd been curious and mildly concerned, not searching for a suspect. But hard enough to be sure Duo hadn't merely been trying to shake off reporters or loan sharks.

That was different from going off to lead his own life. Even when they weren't in contact, they all still checked on each other, were still aware of each other's continued existence, and knew that if they were needed again, they could just drop everything else and band together. But it seemed Duo had meant to cut all ties and disappear. And if Schbeiker knew why, she was keeping it to herself.

Heero still couldn't imagine that Duo was off doing anything detrimental to the peace -- but something illegal? Extremely illegal? Dangerous? Criminal? Yes, he could. Did Heero have enough of a problem with it to bring Maxwell in? It would depend on his motives, on how justified his ruthlessness was.

Would Wufei have a problem with it? It would have to be a _really_ good motive.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2 : AC 199, June 13th  
**  
"That won't be possible; she's in a meeting with ministry officials."

Wufei frowned at Une's secretary. Heero and he had allowed themselves exactly ten minutes to wake up, wash their faces, jump in their clothes, and get out. They'd gotten to work twenty minutes early -- and she was already unavailable? Damn. He could have slowed down and bought himself a coffee. "Which ministry?"

"Ah, Health."

Heero and Wufei exchanged a mildly puzzled look. There were probably things the Preventers could do for such a ministry, but none that were immediately obvious. The Preventers were first and foremost a peacekeeping organization.

"All right. We need to see her sometime today. It needn't be very long, fifteen minutes at most." Hopefully, with limited time to argue, Une would choose not to.

The neat little man behind his desk nodded. "Of course," he said, like he heard that excuse all day and never believed it. "I'll page you when Director Une is available to see you. It might not be today, though -- how about I call you at six PM to reschedule in case she couldn't fit you in?"

Wufei sighed and nodded his assent. That was the best they would get. "Thank you."

They turned away and went back to the elevator. Wufei could see Heero watching him push the button for the office floor; he might have put more strength than necessary in it.

"Coffee?"

"As if you need to ask," Wufei groaned, and trudged his way to the machine after him.

He was so tired. Surviving the jungle, the enemies, and the guerilleros he pretended to share ideals with; fulfilling his mission and orchestrating his escape; and then that mess with trying to prove none of the clues he'd uncovered meant Maxwell or Barton were involved... Two months of stress on not enough sleep were starting to take their toll.

The only reason he hadn't fallen over for an impromptu nap was his daily caffeine intake.

He really, really wanted his coffee. Needed it. Craved it.

That was his excuse as to why he didn't notice Sally swoop down on him until he had the note demanding he report to the infirmary under his nose, blocking his view of the perfect inky blackness inside his plastic cup. The note was wrinkled from Wufei stuffing it in the pocket of his to-be-laundered disguise jacket and still had a little piece of adhesive tape at the top.

"Hi, Wufei," she said brightly. "I see you're not terribly busy this morning."

Wufei drew himself up. She still was a little taller than he was, curse her. "As a matter of fact--"

"We're waiting on Une to get free," Heero said, and took Wufei's betrayed glare with placid neutrality.

Sally gave the two of them a pleased smile. "And I have it on good authority that they'll be at it for a few hours at the very least. Great! I'm kidnapping you."

"We have reports to submit--"

"Heero can do that, can't you, Heero?"

"No problem," the traitor agreed easily.

" _Yuy, damn it._ "

Heero looked at him as if he had no clue what he'd done wrong. Wufei might almost have believed it -- hah, right. Heero wasn't that socially clueless, he was just good at pretending he was. Wasn't he?

"Hm?"

"... Whatever." Wufei drained his cup and threw it in the wastebasket. "Let's get this over with."

He followed Sally up the stairs to the second floor, reminding himself he wasn't supposed to flinch whenever someone suddenly walked out of their offices into the corridor, or came up behind them; the Preventer building was a much safer place than anything he'd been in lately. On Sally's heels, he crossed a glass-walled corridor showing a half-dozen technicians in masks and gloves fiddling with what Wufei presumed was some kind of biological evidence before reaching the infirmary proper. Wufei had expected her to lead him to the usual consultation room, but she directed him all the way to the back and a discreet door.

"Sally?"

"Oh, it's Gail's turn to play doctor on call today, so he gets the front room." Smiling, she pushed the door open and let him in. "I hold another first-aid class at ten."

That room was smaller, without any windows; the equipment looked a little more dented as well, but he doubted Sally would still use it if the damage was more than cosmetic. Wufei walked in with only a hint of reluctance.

"You know, it would be nice if next time you came to me before you gave everyone in the building some exotic jungle disease."

"I don't have any jungle diseases," Wufei grouched. "You'd have known during the week's quarantine I had to endure otherwise. You trained the medic with the extraction team yourself, don't you trust his judgment a little?"

"Oh, but I do," Sally replied pleasantly. "I just trust my equipment more than his."

Wufei gave her an unconvinced look; nevertheless, he took off his shirt, sat on the examination table, and allowed her to feel him up for swollen ganglions, to check his pupils and the beds of his nails, wrap a blood pressure cuff around his biceps, and prick him with a syringe. Her readings taken, she left him on the table to rest with electrodes stuck to his temples and chest, fiddling with her centrifuge and her microscope, which, he admitted, looked significantly more impressive than the medic's.

"So how much sleep have you been getting recently?"

Wufei sighed and reclined on the table. It was easier to talk to Sally when she had her back to him and seemed so neutral and unconcerned, when all he could see was the white lab coat and not the worried, compassionate eyes.

"About four hours a day for the last couple of weeks. Often less." When he got any sleep at all.

"Hm. I don't need to tell you how to use your in-between-missions time, right?"

He groaned. "Ancestors, no. It's not as if I _like_ being sleep-deprived."

Sally laughed lightly. "I'll give you some pills for that. Anything else? Soreness, headaches, dizziness...?"

"Nothing worth mentioning." She looked at him; he added reluctantly, "A couple of fatigue headaches, nothing bad."

"Hm. Pretty appropriate, in your state. Well, you know your own body," she added, distracted by beeping machinery. "Warn me if you notice any symptoms."

Wufei grunted an acknowledgement and closed his eyes. He wasn't going to spit on an occasion to rest his mind and body. He would probably fall asleep if he didn't watch it, though.

"What did you read about that newtype affair?" he asked, eyes still closed.

He could hear soft little clinks as Sally worked on the blood samples. "That's right, you were incommunicado when the news broke. What do you know so far?"

"There's a new gene, it is found mostly on people whose families have been Colonists for a few generations..." His tone went a little ironic, "And it enables them to predict symbols on cards, which is obviously something people should riot about."

Sally made a rude noise under her breath. "It's not a _new_ gene, it's a combination of genes that just didn't arrange themselves that way or didn't express themselves on Earth. Being conceived and living in space apparently only changes their concentration and transmission -- ah, I have scientific journals, maybe you'll like looking at them."

Wufei made a little 'listening' noise, eyes closed. "I might take you up on it. Not surprising that the newspapers would dumb it down, though."

"That, and there are several counter-studies, and of course they're not done yet and none of them agree." Sally chuckled ruefully. "There are some really fascinating things if you hunt down the more detailed reports, though. For example, some people could guess the card all the time, even chosen by a machine, but some could only guess it right when the person supervising the test looked at it first."

Wufei opened an eye, eyebrow quirked up. "... That _is_ interesting. The implications alone -- it's not the same talent at all."

Sally threw him a quick grin over her shoulder. "It has a slightly different gene sequence, too. They're still cataloguing all the permutations and trying to tie them to specific talents. It's hard to find enough test subjects for the rarest, too, and there are some potential gifts that are difficult to quantify."

"As in?"

Sally gave a faint worried frown. "Charisma, for one. It's something that people have spent centuries trying to define. How do you tell when it's perfectly natural and unique to the person, and when it's boosted by something in their genes?"

Wufei stretched his legs comfortably and smiled. Mmh, academic debate. Now that was a lot better to think about than vendettas and vigilantism by old allies. "You could argue that's the definition of natural charisma, too. Physical appearance and voice are largely defined by genetics, and I suspect even someone who has the newtype genes for it wouldn't go far if their personality was too horrid to support it. It's not a brainwashing kind of ability, is it?"

Sally's back hunched a little, her tone of voice a little more somber. "Not as far as we can tell. But we don't have a wide enough research pool to test for that one. And, of course, the very idea that they could be robbed of their free will and made to unconditionally adore someone is already starting to panic people."

Wufei frowned. "And even if researchers never find someone strong enough to do that, it still won't be enough to prove that they don't exist _somewhere_."

"Yes, exactly," Sally replied with a frustrated huff. "It's easy enough to prove that something like that exists, you just have to find it -- but that it _doesn't_..."

They lapsed into silence, Sally thoroughly testing his blood for jungle parasites, Wufei brooding over the propensity of the human race to scare itself silly and turn on itself over unproven conjectures.

"... Anyway... You might find it funny, there was a subject who got every single answer wrong. How statistically likely is that?"

About as much as getting them all right. Wufei gave an amused snort.

"Which means he'd actually be pretty high-level, because very few of them had a success rate over ninety percent. And by very few I mean perhaps a half-dozen people at most out of the thousands tested. It's a relief, isn't it?"

Wufei grunted his assent. "Good to know they still have an error margin. ... Will this be done soon?" He tapped the electrodes.

"Oh, no, I need a full reading. I'd say at least two hours."

"That long?" Wufei scowled. "I have things to do."

"If it's research for your new case, Heero can do it. And if it's paperwork for the old one, it can wait," she said firmly.

Wufei frowned, suspicious. "Why do you need a full brain and body reading anyway? I understand a short EEG to make sure the lack of sleep isn't causing problems..."

Sally chuckled as she powered down the instruments she'd been using. "Don't you trust me?"

Ah, so that was it. "Of course I trust you." Wufei didn't bother hiding his cynicism. "I trust you to make bogus excuses to make sure I take a nap today, amongst other things."

They stared at each other for a few seconds, Wufei with his eyes narrowed in wariness, Sally with a casual and innocent expression that didn't suit her much; and then she laughed again, a little chagrined. "I really would appreciate a full reading..."

" _Sally_."

"... For comparison purposes, in case something happens at some point."

Wufei scowled, unconvinced. "So it doesn't need to be _now_."

"No, but it's one of the rare times of the year I can catch you where you're not too busy to afford it. I'll come get you when I get the result for the blood tests, how about that?"

Wufei glared at her.

"Thank you, Wufei." And with a last smile and a friendly wave, she was gone, closing the door behind her with a soft click.

Wufei opened his mouth to protest, but of course she would pretend not to have heard him, and then chastise him like a child if he went and freed himself. With an irritated huff, he lay back down on the padded table.

Meddlesome woman. At least she could have brought him to one of the rooms that had actual _beds_. She had better wake him up in two hours tops; he didn't want to waste all morning. With some luck, Une would see him during lunch, and it wouldn't hurt to have a little more dirt on Kamenov to convince her with.

+

"Oi, Yuy, food time!"

Heero looked up from the report he was checking for mistakes and gave the young man leaning through the door of his cubicle a weird look, complete with eyebrow arched quizzically. "Dietrik. The panel won't support your weight for long," he pointed out.

The man just laughed and stepped inside, all six foot three of him plus linebacker shoulders, considerably shrinking the rest of Heero's already small space. "Aw, you _do_ worry for me! Come on, I'm sure you're hungry. It's noon already."

Heero didn't bother checking his computer clock. "Still ten minutes to go for that."

Another head popped in sight, hair dyed green and purple and twisted into strange loops, on top of an exceedingly proper woman's business suit. "You know what they say, the early bird gets the worm!"

"You can have my worm," Heero deadpanned. In his opinion, it hadn't been terribly funny, but the two laughed anyway. At least they recognized it as an attempt at humor, which was better than many of his other coworkers. His supervisor, Heero knew, would have stared at him with faint horror and believed he really was that ignorant.

The forty-something woman with the weird hair gave him a mock-stern look. "Stop it, we know you're not that busy or you'd have just pretended we weren't there. My treat?"

Heero arched an eyebrow. "Generous." Mostly because the meals were practically free, and she owed him anyway.

He'd planned on having a sandwich with Wufei as they discussed the results of his search on Kamenov, but Wufei hadn't reappeared. Heero was reasonably sure he would have sent word not to wait if something had prevented him from coming back to the cubicle after leaving the infirmary. Heero briefly considered the likelihood of Chang Wufei, pilot 05, getting kidnapped on the second floor of a high-security building full of armed and intensively trained policemen, and decided that he was probably being debriefed on some minor point of his report. That, or Sally had locked him up for incubating some strange jungle sickness.

Heero noticed that Sofia had been giving him a narrow-eyed glare while he'd been thinking, but the second he looked at her she switched it for an affable smile. "We've got a puzzle for you."

Heero blinked. "Puzzle?"

Smugly, Sofia rattled out a list of computer specs and security measures -- both on the computer itself and in the building it was housed -- that would have made even Heero think twice. "There was no internet. There was no intranet. The computer wasn't even equipped for wireless. The next Monday, the info had been sold to three separate parties."

"Inside job."

The woman's smugness went up a notch. "Not in that case."

"... Give me thirty seconds." Heero speed-read the rest of his report, didn't find anything worth correcting, and keyed send, close-program, and shut-down in under five seconds. Two seconds later, he was out of his chair and slipping between Dietrik's imposing frame and the wall. "Let's go."

They were almost to the cafeteria when Sally's voice called his name. Heero paused and turned to look for her, finding her emerging from a conference room. Sofia and Dietrik took another few steps before they noticed he was gone.

"Heero!" Sally crossed the growing flow of people emigrating to the cafeteria. "Just the man I wanted to see."

Huh. "Sally," he acknowledged, neutral. She was smiling, but it looked more like habit than amusement or happiness.

"Just checking -- you managed fine without Wufei?" she asked briskly.

Heero nodded.

"Good! So I won't have to feel guilty. Your partner is taking a nap in the infirmary, room 10-E. Will you wake him up? I'm not going to be able to get away for a few more hours here."

"... Sure. Did you drug him?"

Sally let out a laugh that was more surprised than amused. Though knowing her, Heero didn't think it had been such an unreasonable supposition.

"I thought about it, but he must have been more tired than I believed; he barely protested. I hope he won't be annoyed at me for messing up his sleep cycle."

Someone called her back from inside the conference room, and Heero nodded. "He'll deal. Just go."

"Alright. I'm counting on you!"

Sally strode away and disappeared. Heero turned around to find his two colleagues waiting a few polite steps behind. It wasn't far enough not to hear anything, though, and Dietrik made disturbingly anguished puppy eyes at him. "You gotta go?"

Sofia nodded sadly. "Such a shame, I bet by the time we get this mystery unraveled you won't even be back yet."

Wufei came before irrelevant computer mysteries, of course; but he also needed all the sleep he could get. Heero shook his head and started walking toward the cafeteria again. "I'll go afterward."

The cafeteria was already filling up, though due to the absence of three field teams it wasn't packed as thick as it could have been; but the rest of the Geek Squad -- the Computer Crimes Division -- had decided to gather at one table instead of spreading onto two. Dietrik dragged an extra chair to sit at a corner, and they started debating. Heero didn't say much at first, listening with one ear as he read over the case file. Without being able to inspect the computer itself, Heero couldn't rule out external tampering. Still, it was an intriguing mental exercise. And contrary to his other headache -- the case he and Wufei were working -- it didn't suffer from lack of theories and difficulties to prove or disprove anything. Either something was doable or it wasn't.

The table was animated, and a few of the guys were noisy. Heero disliked trying to speak over someone else, but Sofia and Matthew from Accounting didn't see anything wrong with digging their elbows in people's ribs to make them pipe down. Of course, elbowing too hard provoked short spats that were even noisier than the rest. Vaguely annoyed, Heero reclined in his seat and tried to ignore them -- and that was when he noticed Commander Une making the rounds.

Stiff and stern, she led a pair of men in beige suits through the floor; a secretary trailed after the three of them. Heero had known Une for quite some time now, and while her expression was still that of long-practiced neutrality, there was a tilt to her chin that reminded him more of the ex-OZ Colonel than the ex-ambassador. The two men -- no doubt the Health Ministry envoys -- chatted amiably at her as they looked around. It seemed like she was introducing people here and there on the way out of the cafeteria...

Looking back at her guests, she waved her hand toward Heero's table. Huh. She didn't look at Heero, only at a blond guy with floppy hair who was busy making sure one of his coworkers knew exactly why he was right and she was wrong.

"Agent Ling, if I could..."

"--Are you blind or what, it would blow up in your -- oh, Commander."

Une's eye twitched a little, but she didn't say anything, only waving at the two men following her. "Agent Ling, Eric Madison and Cliff Branforth from the Health ministry. They're heading a national effort to chart some unknown parts of the human genome. Director Madison, Mr. Branforth, Edward Ling, biochemist."

Human genome, huh. Considering the current news, there wasn't much of a question as to what this was about. Heero's gaze sharpened. Now the real question was why would people researching Newtypes stress Une out so much.

Madison had cropped, graying honey-blond hair, and a winsome smile. Branforth was older, fifty perhaps, and with a sharper, more prominent bone structure; but the graying haircut was about the same, and the suits matched, apart from the nuance of blue of their shirts. The discussion at the table died down as the two newcomers flattered Ling and joked about trying to tempt him away from the Preventers and in one of their own labs. Une looked quite unimpressed; thankfully Ling didn't seem to be all that interested by the offer.

They did a token effort at being polite by introducing the rest of the members. Sofia stretched out to shake hands over the table, but Heero only nodded his greeting, unwilling to bend over and unbalance himself. He hadn't expected Director Madison to take a couple of steps between the tables to get closer to him. It was hard to refuse to shake hands now without being grossly impolite.

"Agent... Yuy, was it?" Madison said, glancing down at Heero's badge.

Heero frowned a little; it might have been paranoia, but he had a feeling the man's glance had only served to confirm something he already knew.

"Heero Yuy, huh. Like the great pacifist? That's strangely appropriate," the man joked. "A relative perhaps? Where are you from?"

Une hadn't told them his first name when she introduced everyone, and the badge only had his last and an initial. "The Sank Kingdom," he replied blandly, declining to laugh along. Madison's chuckles died down.

"Ah. ...Well. I heard you were partnered with an agent from L5?"

They _definitely_ were too aware of who he was, who Wufei was. And perhaps even of what they had in common, apart from currently being partners. Was it about their shared past? "...Yes."

"Would you happen to know which specific colony he's from?"

Heero frowned. "No. Why do you want to know?"

Madison chuckled. "Nothing bad, nothing bad. We're conducting a little survey, and we would be very interested to have more participants from the L5 cluster."

At least they hadn't looked deep enough to know that while Heero's ID listed him as a Sank citizen, it was just as likely he'd been born there as anywhere else in the Earth Sphere.

"We don't have time for surveys." Heero caught Une's eyes. "We're waiting for orders to leave on a mission."

Une's eyebrow twitched upwards in an interrogative fashion, but Branforth looked at her and her expression smoothed out again. Madison was still talking at him.

"--wouldn't take much longer than it takes to get a blood sample. One of our projects deals with correlations between an individual's genetic predispositions and their chosen career, you see."

Heero arched a doubtful eyebrow.

"So you want to know if Newtypes have favorite jobs, then?" Dietrik joked hesitantly.

Neither Heero nor Madison acknowledged him. "The same kind of correlation between people with good physical coordination and people who practice sports," Heero suggested blandly.

Madison and his colleague laughed, and the rest of the table gave a polite chuckle, though Ling and Sofia's expression was attentive and Dietrik's a little worried . "I suspect as much," Branforth said from where he was standing beside Une. "But we have to make sure anyway."

"All genetic samples are to be anonymous, of course, and we welcome all kinds, but I thought it might be especially interesting to get Agent Chang's. For reasons which you're no doubt aware of, samples from a few specific areas of that cluster are, ah, something of a rarity."

Due to the cluster not being very large even before the Dragon Clan colony self-destructed, and the sole Dragon survivors being people who had been stranded on Earth or other colonies at the time of its self-destruction; yes, Heero was aware.

"I'll pass the invitation along," Heero promised neutrally. Except that by invitation he meant warning. Even if those men's project came from innocently academic motives, the last thing Newtypes needed was to end up on a list -- and field agents already at a risk of being attacked just for doing their job needed it even less than the rest. Even anonymously given, a genetic sample wasn't untraceable; if it were, the forensics department would be out of a job.

Une apparently had had enough; she checked her wristwatch briskly. "Gentlemen, we're going off-schedule. I suggest we proceed to the next department."

Madison laughed, of course; Heero wondered if he ever truly stopped. "Ah, of course, of course, my apologies. Well, Agents, nice meeting you. Agent Ling, don't forget about our proposition, eh?"

Madison waved genially, Branforth nodded a salute to the table, and they left with Une, whose eyes had a steely glint Heero found a lot more Colonel than Lady.

"Well, uh." Dietrik frowned worriedly and gave Heero a puzzled look. "I'm sure they mean well, but it's kind of a silly idea, isn't it? What with how messy things are out here."

"Yeah," someone else agreed. "Also you need just one dirty official -- and voila, a whole convenient list of Newtypes in the government, complete with name, address and position, for them to do god knows what with. Oh, you lost your job? Sorry, just budget cuts, you know how that is. No, nothing to do with that innocent blood test at all."

"Yeah, or... 'use your mind powers to kill the President or we out you!'"

There was laughter. "You read too many comics!"

Someone started teasing Ling for flirting with big manly men for money; Heero decided he'd socialized enough.

"Yuy?" Sofia asked, when she saw him get up with his tray in hand. "You're already leaving? You haven't eaten anything..."

"I've got to get Chang."

But when he was in the corridor, he wasn't sure anymore that he needed to rush. Wufei was in the infirmary, in a room out of the way. If he was still sleeping, good; he needed it. And even if he woke up at the wrong time and met those men, what could happen? They wouldn't get much past the confirmation that he existed and a marked lack of interest in participating in their survey. They weren't going to force a blood sample out of him right on the spot; besides, in the unlikely event that they were crazy enough to try, Wufei would bleed them right back.

Wouldn't be impossible to borrow a lost hair, though.

Heero had a tendency to paranoia. He knew that. So instead of going straight to Wufei, he went to his desk first, to get the files he was supposed to work on.

He could work on them just as well in the infirmary.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part of this chapter used to be a 1+5 oneshot; you might have seen it on ffnet or lj. I ruthlessly salvaged it for this. I'm telling myself I just didn't know what I wrote it for back then. Yeah. >_>;

**AC 199, still June 13th**

Wufei woke to a faint rustle of paper sheets under a scratchy pen. He expected Sally, but when he opened his eyes just a crack and slipped a stealthy glance at his companion, to make sure, he saw a head of messy brown hair leaning over a pink folder. He sat up; Heero looked over at him and nodded a greeting.

"What are you doing here?" Wufei asked. He rubbed the back of his head; the impromptu nap had left him a little muggy.

"Sally told me to wake you up."

Wufei frowned. "... I notice you didn't."

"I wasn't that quiet. Figured it would wake you once you had slept enough." Heero looked up at him, and then went back to his report. "It's four PM."

"-- What?" Wufei checked his watch. So it was. " _Yuy!_ "

Of course, Heero entirely failed to look guilty. "Une is still too busy to deal with us; you didn't miss anything. Apart from some paperwork."

Wufei glared, and then sighed heavily. "Now I'm going to be up all night."

"You would have been anyway." Yuy pulled an envelope out of his pocket and threw it on Wufei's lap.

Huh. Short-term mission : high-kidnapping-risk child needing a bodyguard from five PM to whenever her guardian would come back in the evening... Wufei wasn't on the bodyguard roster, but he'd been known to make exceptions for one person, and he relaxed a little. He hadn't seen Mariemeya in over five months now, between her school obligations and his undercover mission.

"Ah, but the affair..."

"We have no info today that we didn't have yesterday," Heero commented philosophically. "Who knows, maybe you'll have a flash of genius over dinner."

Wufei would have snorted to hide his smile, but Heero's expression didn't quite match his words. Too serious. The man leaned forward, index finger brushing along the lines of the message. No name, he mouthed in silence.

... No name, he was right -- Mariemeya was designed as 'your usual charge.' Strange. Wufei frowned at Heero. Someone listening? he mouthed right back, but Heero only shrugged, as if he had no clue.

"Has Une been in reunion all afternoon?"

"Mmh. Messenger said she hasn't left that room since lunch."

So she was still around the Health Ministry representatives. He wondered if that was relevant. At the very least it meant he couldn't go and ask if the lack of name had a reason.

Wufei took a pen out of Heero's backpack and started filling the Mission Accepted paperwork.

"By the way," Heero said casually, "the Health Ministry is trying to figure out what kind of newtypes work in the Preventers."

Wufei didn't pause at all, handwriting neat and regular. "Oh?"

"Probably in other ESUN-run organizations as well. Maybe even in civilian groups. They're curious to see if special talents benefit to specific jobs, apparently."

Wufei grunted, and started ticking off boxes. "Interesting."

"Director Madison said he'd like you to participate. Seems like some kinds of L5 genotypes are rare nowadays."

Wufei's eyes narrowed, though he pretended he was only glaring at his incomplete badge number. " _Really_."

So they wanted his genotype. Or so they said. And Sally arranged for him to spend the day asleep in a corner, and Heero chose to work at Wufei's bedside rather than at his desk where he could be found. Add that to the strange formulation of the message, and the fact that Une had spent all day with the two men; it made Wufei wonder if perhaps Une didn't want said Health Ministry representatives to know that Preventer Agent Chang was routinely trusted with the safety of her adoptive daughter. Or maybe just that she didn't want him around them. He was grateful, but he could have rejected the offer on his own. ... Or could he have?

Or their interest could be entirely innocent, and Sally just wanted to mother something and it just so happened her latest cactus had died on her so Wufei was it, and Judy Carlson from Accounting had tried flirting with Heero again so he'd retreated where she wouldn't think to look for him, and Une did not, despite appearances to the contrary, know every single form by heart and like all common mortals she sometimes forgot unimportant details which was why the formulation of the hand-written notice was different.

Wufei shrugged philosophically. He would know soon enough, and in the meantime he would keep his eyes open. He smirked wryly. "It's too bad I have no time to get poked and prodded with a needle these days, isn't it."

"Heh. I didn't get the feeling it was mandatory anyway."

Wufei allowed himself to roll his eyes in amusement; he buried the wariness he felt deep under it. "Thank all the gods and ancestors it isn't. And I doubt many of our colleagues will go through with it, for the same reason as mine." Paranoia was a way of life for a Preventer. "As if we don't get shot and stabbed full of enough holes on the job."

Heero hummed in apparent disinterest.

"Still..." Wufei mused. "It might be interesting to know what kind of jobs newtypes prefer, from a purely scholarly point of view."

Too bad all practical applications of those results gave him thoughts of potential disaster. From favoring those with powers and fostering resentment and fear in the ones without, to putting newtypes on file and restricting their freedom for being born potentially dangerous... Wufei could see the ghosts of frankly dystopian futures on either end of the spectrum. Hell, it didn't need to go too far to become unfair and discriminatory -- many jobs asked for a drug scan at employment.

"...You know, when you look at the psychic ability test results, most of those people probably had no clue they were in any way different before they got the results..." Wufei mused. "It's just too subtle in a lot of cases. At most they assumed they were insightful or lucky."

It occurred to him, then, to wonder if he counted as a newtype too. If the progression on L5 had been the same as the other Colonies, then there was a twenty percent chance he carried some of the genes -- maybe even more. His colony had been one of the oldest; on his mother's side he was fourth generation.

Meiran had been fifth generation Colony-born on one side, and, in some way, sixth through her father's mother's lineage, though personally Wufei didn't think immigrating a short month before the baby was born really counted. The argument had been fierce, bitter, and was still unresolved...

...Never mind that. Whether he had some subtle, unremarkable ability or not, it didn't change who he was. And if he did, better if people didn't know it. Himself included. He might start depending on it, or wondering what he could have changed if he'd only known how to.

Wufei's laptop was in his bag, at the foot of the table. He started working with little enthusiasm, knowing he had to leave soon but not wanting to have come to work just to end up sleeping the day away.

He clicked absently on a news site's link, even as he gathered authorizations and cost sheets and the info he needed to tidy up his reports. Read the whole article. Clicked two links open, so as not to lose the first. Summarized more case reports. Opened five articles, plus an online encyclopedia page to clarify some background assumptions. Hit a search engine. Remembered that he had pictures to include in his second report, swore a bit, had to reformat the whole thing so they would fit. Went right back to his newtype articles.

Geneticist shop talk and religious flailing, enthusiastic geek blogs and worried watchdog sites, a so-called true newtype's own point of view and at least twelve he was pretty sure were fakes. So many sides of the issue.

He probably would have kept reading past the time he was to go pick up Mariemeya if Heero hadn't nudged him. Damn, five minutes left.

"What's so funny, Yuy?" he growled as he started closing tabs.

His partner smirked at him. "You. It's only now you're starting to think about what that newtype business actually means. Humanity turned out to be a sci-fi fan's wet dream and your first thought was for the riots it was going to cause."

"That's the only relevant one!" Wufei grouched back, and clicked 'print' on his report. "The rest is idle speculation." Heero only shook his head in fake sadness and kept smirking; Wufei huffed at him. "And what was _your_ first thought, hm?"

Heero's expression slid back to cool and unconcerned. "That it was interesting, and that it would get messy."

Wufei frowned. Yuy rarely lied to him; that didn't make him like it much better when it happened.

It was useless to try to guess the truth, though; knowing Heero, it could be just about anything, from "it was deeply traumatic" to "I've always known about them, of course; I'm goddamn Heero Yuy" to "they get me hot and bothered." On second thought, Yuy would need hormones for that last one.

"You're going to be late," Heero said without looking at him.

Well, maybe he'd tell him later. And maybe it was just a way to tell Wufei to back off.

Without a word, Wufei powered down and packed up his laptop, picked up the printed pages, and walked out of the infirmary and down toward the motor pool. He'd get a car, go pick up that brilliant, teenage ex-World Sovereign, and spend an entertaining evening attempting to verbally spar her to a standstill.

At least he would be able to clear his mind of all that L2 and newtypes rubbish and relax a little.

\--

"Mariemeya, you're _fourteen_."

"You were _married_ at fourteen!"

"Not to someone _seven years older!_ "

\--

"Then of course it degenerated into 'are you calling me immature' and 'how dare you tell me what I feel' and 'I would _know_ if it was just a crush'."

Wufei groaned and massaged his temples. He'd forced himself to go to bed anyway, but he hadn't slept too well.

"She's not entirely wrong. She didn't get the luxury of being a child very long either."

Wufei glared nastily at Heero, who sat on the other side of the table, totally unperturbed, and kept making little annotations in the margins of Wufei's case report.

"That was helpful, Yuy. Really."

Heero shrugged, his nose still in the report. Wufei glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the café, just to check that Heero wasn't the only one being totally indifferent to the fact that a widely underage teenage girl had propositioned him just the previous evening. No one else seemed to have heard, or cared; Wufei didn't know whether to be grateful or annoyed. The matter was more delicate than his partner seemed to realize. Granted, they had other things to worry about at the moment, like the fact that they'd wasted another half-day and Une still hadn't had an occasion to see them and approve their trip...

"... Never mind. I don't know what possessed me to think you might have some insight into the situation."

A corner of Heero's mouth tilted up in a fleeting smirk. "I lack your experience with jailbait."

"Don't make me hurt you."

Heero didn't even dignify the empty threat with a response. He picked up his coffee cup and took a sip, eyes still fixed on the sheets of paper in his hand. "The numbers are wrong. Divergence of zero-point-seven percent. I'll check the database to see where the error occurred."

Wufei frowned, and leaned over the table to check what Heero was pointing at. They bowed their heads together over the paper as Heero's finger tapped the wrong numbers. Wufei was good at math, but not by nearly enough to pick up on the discrepancy Heero had found.

"There's a calculator in your brain, isn't there."

"Doctor J thought it might come in handy," Heero retorted dryly. Wufei rolled his eyes at him and sat back down.

The back of his neck prickled with the awareness of a whole roomful of people behind him. Next time he would reach the café early, so he could steal the bench against the wall from Yuy. He vaguely thought of shoving Heero in the corner and sitting beside him -- craning his neck to see the paperwork was getting annoying as well -- but while Heero wouldn't care what that looked like, there were enough colleagues coming here on their break that Wufei did.

"So you're not interested in her."

Wufei twitched. "Yuy, for god's sake, she's fourteen -- of course not!"

"If her age is the only deterrent, you could just tell her you'll talk about it when she's eighteen. She's smart enough to understand the legal ramifications." Heero quirked an eyebrow. "She might grow out of it in the meantime."

Heero looked too placid to get angry at, and his tone of voice just too reasonable to take offense. Wufei was tempted, though. "Grow out of it? You're talking about Mariemeya Barton Kushrenada. The only person more stubborn than her is--"

"You?"

The bastard was smirking. Wufei growled. "One of these days I really am going to hurt you."

"If you meant it, you'd challenge me to meet at the gym for a spar."

Wufei gave him a teeth-baring grin. "Good idea. How about tomorrow?" They would sadly have the time, if the PR circus that camped in Une's office was anything to go by.

Heero seemed more amused by the second. Wufei was starting to look forward to an occasion to slam him down into the tatami.

"So it's not simply that you've never considered her, but that you're actively against it?"

And now he looked _thoughtful_. Wufei wondered why he had ever thought it a good idea to mention the situation to him. Sure, they were great partners on the field, and his insight was invaluable on a lot of Wufei's cases, and they had a common interest in hand-to-hand fighting, politics and good guns, and Wufei might even -- god forbid -- enjoy his subtle sense of sarcasm and his strange philosophy of life. But like he needed Yuy to turn that brilliant analyst's mind to such a delicate and -- well -- mundane matter.

"... Yes. I am."

"Did you tell her so?"

Wufei sighed. "Yuy... I like the girl. She trusts me. I have no wish to hurt her feelings by telling her that the idea of sleeping with her makes my skin crawl."

It was really too bad that neither Wufei nor Mariemeya were Heero Yuy; the man could take and dish out honest criticism at point-blank range without flinching. It was a very admirable trait, and one Wufei wished more people shared. Not that Wufei couldn't do blunt with the best, but -- not with Mariemeya. Not about that. He gazed at the table without really seeing it, thinking back to her confession. It had to have taken a lot of guts, and with some distance, he was almost proud of her for being so brave and tenacious... Almost being the key word. Damn it.

"Why does it?"

"Why does what?"

"Make your skin crawl. Why?" Heero picked up his cup of coffee and raised it to his lips, his eyes still fixed on Wufei.

"I met her when she was _ten_ ," Wufei snapped.

"She's not ten anymore."

Well -- of course she wasn't! It didn't mean Wufei didn't remember her being ten. "Do you _want_ me to molest her, Yuy?"

Heero snorted. "From what you tell me, she would be the one to molest you." He shrugged off Wufei's frustrated glare. "I'm just curious."

Wufei sighed and leaned back in his chair, staring away from the table. He couldn't meet Heero's frank stare and just be objective and cold about the situation. "... She's -- it's not ethical."

"Hm?"

Wufei set his cup down and nudged it around by the handle, watching cold tea slosh around inside. "We are not equals. The relationship is closer to mentor-student. It wouldn't be right."

"Ah."

Wufei sighed again -- he was doing it a lot, it seemed -- and admitted, more quietly. "I killed her father. There is a debt there. There always will be. Telling her of him... That can never compare. I must strive to compensate for her loss anyway -- in part by being a dependable older male figure in her life. Not a father -- never a father -- but a ... brother, uncle maybe. Children need those."

Heero's voice was just as quiet when he answered, "She never knew him."

"Because I killed him before she could!"

Heero didn't flinch in the face of his anger, but then he never did; his voice stayed perfectly steady. "Then it's more about your feelings toward Treize than your feelings toward Mariemeya."

Wufei stared at Heero, dumbstruck. "...My -- _what_ toward Treize?"

Heero arched an eyebrow. "Guilt is a feeling, isn't it?"

\-- Oh. Of course. What had he thought Heero meant? It was a good thing Wufei didn't blush easily. He lifted his cup of tea to his lips, and grimaced when the cold liquid hit his tongue. That was what he got for getting distracted by the conversation.

"If I tell her that, she might believe that our whole relationship is nothing more than an attempt to soothe my guilt, though." And it wasn't -- he enjoyed their long historical talks or the triumphant smiles she gave him when managing a new kata without stumbling, enjoyed being around her more than he'd ever thought he would enjoy being around a child -- or, well, a teenager now -- but it wasn't romantic, would never be romantic, and the idea felt, in fact, slightly incestuous to him.

But if he told her that, she'd probably retort that he was an only child, so what did he know about incest. And he really, really wanted to turn around and check whether anyone was listening in on the conversation, but surely Yuy would signal him if that happened. Bastard and his back to the wall.

"So you have good reasons why not, but explaining them to her would hurt her feelings." Heero leaned back and crossed his arms, contemplative.

"Yes." Wufei massaged the bridge of his nose. "She's a smart girl, but you know how difficult and contrary she can get. I can't possibly find a way to explain that she cannot take as a personal slight, if she puts her mind to it."

"So you need to give her a reason that has nothing to do with her at all. Hm. You haven't gone out with anyone since the war, have you?"

Wufei rolled his eyes. "Are you channeling Sally? I'm busy, Yuy, busy and in no mood to make time for inane chattering with people I don't have anything in common with."

"Hm." Heero gave him a long, sober look that was probably his equivalent of a 'this might hurt, please don't take umbrage' caveat. "Does this have anything to do with your wife? Mariemeya would probably accept that."

"... Hah." Wufei couldn't help a small, rueful smile. It did hurt, a bit; he tried not to dwell on it. Heero's obvious awareness of the old wound helped; he wasn't gentle with people's feelings very often. "Mostly insofar as it's rare to find people with Nataku's fire and her sense of right and wrong."

"Of which Mariemeya is one," Yuy commented pseudo-innocently.

Wufei's eyes narrowed. "That's it. Meet me tomorrow evening at seven at the gym."

Heero smirked faintly at him; Wufei gave him a threatening glare, that he couldn't keep up. Heero really was annoying when he put his mind to it, but Wufei had to admit, he was glad to have him around. ...Sometimes. Somewhat. Bastard.

"So you have no objection to dating other people."

Apart from his own high standards, no, not any objection that would stand a Sally-class counter-examination. He switched tracks. "I can't tell her she doesn't meet my requirements."

"But you could tell her you're already dating someone else."

Heero looked so matter-of-fact; Wufei almost forgot to be offended. Almost. "Are you suggesting I _lie_ to her?"

He didn't have words for how abhorrent the idea was. Heero paused, tilted his head as if he were considering it. Taking a sip, Wufei watched him, eyes narrowed, just waiting for him to dare agree.

"Tell her you're dating me."

Wufei almost spat his cold tea on the files. " _What_?"

"We've been meeting for more or less social purposes off the clock for a while now. I'm sure some people would count them as dates."

Wufei stared at him, and almost sagged in relief when he caught the glint in Heero's eyes, like a smirk that wasn't allowed to reach his mouth.

Heero's sense of humor was completely twisted. "Oh, great idea," Wufei retorted, only a second too late for a natural comeback; Heero's lips quirked up smugly. "You are of course right; all those walks on the beach and long talks by the fire, nothing happened that was different from a real date." Wufei paused. "Save for the utter lack of anything remotely intimate or romantic. Ever."

"Hm..."

Heero tapped his chin with his fingers, giving the perfect appearance of being deep in thought.

"That's right."

And then he shrugged, leaned forward, and pressed his lips against Wufei's in a quick, entirely casual dry kiss. Every single cell of Wufei's brain crashed and burned.

"Now it's not a lie anymore." Heero sat back, and picked up his coffee to finish it.

Crunch. Wufei unclenched his fingers from their tight grasp on his ex-cup and blotted cold tea off his lap, mind whirling, unable to do anything but stare in disbelief as Yuy took sip after sip.

 _What the hell_?

"... Yuy."

"Hm?"

"Did you just ... Kiss me?"

Heero shrugged, indifferent save from the devilish glint in his eyes. "That makes our meetings dates, technically, so you're not lying. You're safe from the jailbait."

Wufei kept staring. Heero couldn't mean that, could he? It was probably a joke -- he'd done worse, Wufei just knew he was behind Cadet Jenson's bothersome cellphone ending up serenading the newbies from the very tall, very unclimbable radar tower, there was just no one else, and there had been other times...

Wufei just could see his face, too, using his supposed social cluelessness like a weapon. _'I just provided you with a way out of your little dilemma, Chang. Who cares?'_ And he'd arch an eyebrow like he didn't know what the fuss was about and wasn't too impressed with Wufei's reaction either way. Argh.

Unless he was testing the waters, and then -- argh. Augh. Urrgh. Gah. Where were his words? Wufei couldn't find any, not even to tell himself what the hell he was thinking right now.

"... Uh."

Heero picked up his backpack and slung one of the straps over his shoulder, and looked at him as if nothing abnormal had ever happened. "Still on for that spar tomorrow?"

Wufei stared at Heero. Heero just tilted his head patiently, all calm blue eyes and floppy bangs and utter ordinary-ness.

Wufei threw up his hands. "Oh, _fine_." He wasn't sure what he was agreeing to; fine, I'll meet you or fine, I'll pretend-date you. Thinking wasn't working right now. But if Yuy wanted to give him occasions to beat him up... "Since you're so smart, what do I say when she asks me why I didn't tell her I've suddenly become gay?"

"The truth." Heero allowed that smirk to bloom. "You're not gay; I'm just that good."

Wufei lunged over the table; but Heero dodged his swipe with irritating ease, escaping into the crowd, and strolled away without turning back.

Cocky bastard. Wufei was going to _hurt_ him tomorrow.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4 : AC 199, June 15 th**

"Yes, Mariemeya, I am in fact dating Heero Yuy. Since yester -- hm. A few months. Years. Ish. I don't remember the first date."

He could just see her 'do you really think I am mentally deficient' look.

"Of course I wasn't trying to hide it from you. I just -- didn't _know_ that we were dating. That's why I didn't think to mention to you that I was in actuality taken, even though it would have stopped this whole argument in its tracks. I didn't know I was, _yet I was_. Yes."

Wufei sneered at himself.

Yuy's excuse seemed more stupid by the minute. Mariemeya would only feel insulted.

He wasn't so pathetic, so cowardly that he needed to lie in such a situation. It would only spare him the cost of accepting responsibility for the pain he would inflict her; she would both hurt from his rejection and feel herself held in contempt, since he wasn't even bothering to come up with a believable excuse.

Either Heero was even more socially impaired than he seemed, or he had known the excuse wouldn't fly from the start.

Or he wanted to make the excuse truth.

Wufei couldn't even tell himself Heero was pranking him. It just didn't fit much with his sense of humor. If it had been just a joke -- oh, Wufei could have seen the sarcastic 'tell her you're dating me', but Heero would never have kissed him. Or at least he'd have smirked afterwards and told him 'I can't believe you bought that, Chang.'

Unless he assumed the joke was so evident he didn't need to actually say so. The kiss had been dry, quick, barely a peck. Maybe he didn't think it counted.

Wufei sighed and glared blearily at the TV in the corner of the break room. The news station was in the middle of a segment on the culture of manioc in the south of Spain of all things. The announcer's voice was annoying, but it covered his own angry mutterings so Wufei hadn't bothered to turn it down.

Why on Earth was Yuy coming on to him _now_ , in the middle of a case?

... When _weren't_ they in the middle of a case. Yes, well. Whatever.

Perhaps there had been someone in the café who had to be misdirected -- no, it was pretty easy to find out they were partners, they didn't need an excuse to hang out. Since when -- was it serious? ... How serious? Wufei hadn't noticed anything. No, it had to be a joke, a very socially awkward joke.

"What did manioc ever do to you?"

Wufei twitched and glared at the door, where that asshole brain-breaking Yuy stood, a plastic bag full of sandwiches and drinks in hand.

" _What_?"

Heero looked at him quizzically, as if he had no clue why Wufei was in this state of mind. "You could just switch channels."

He searched in his bag and dumped a sandwich on Wufei's lap. Wufei picked it up and muttered his thanks without thinking, and then glared some more. It was his favorite. Damn it, Yuy.

Heero still didn't seem to pay him any mind. Picking up the remote, he turned up the volume. For a second Wufei wondered what kind of noises he was planning to hide, and didn't know whether to run or stay. There were very few things he didn't wish to discuss with Yuy, but that strange new development was definitely one.

"Weird how Une doesn't have the time to sign off on our mission request, but she has the time to send us on errands."

Wufei blinked, train of thought screeching to a grinding halt. Switching tracks took a couple of shamefully long seconds.

"I spent all morning doing a surprise computer security inspection," Heero commented. "You?"

"Exercise room, assisting with self-defense training." Now that he was thinking about it, that seemed a little like they'd tried to tuck him out of sight. The gym was quite out of the way, in a separate building entirely.

Heero nodded like that just confirmed something he'd expected all along.

"Health Ministry employees," Wufei said. He wasn't sure how they were linked to the whole thing, but something was at work there and he had a feeling they were in the middle of it. When Heero glanced at him, slightly cynical and wholly unsurprised, Wufei knew he'd had the same thought. "What do we know about them?"

"Just that there's a joint mission no one's talking about, but it's taking three whole field teams to see through." Heero's eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "And that they want to meet you. That one might be a minor detail, though -- they're bored waiting for the mission to be completed, you just happen to be in reach..."

"Stop me if that doesn't make sense." Wufei drummed his fingers on his thigh, eyes unfocused as he let his thoughts run free. "They're interested in newtypes. Newtypes and their jobs. Especially in government jobs. Especially for the Health Ministry... The mission is likely newtype-related."

Heero nodded, eyes sharp and intent.

"Une wants to keep us here. They're always with her... She doesn't meet us. She doesn't meet us _because_ they're with her? But she doesn't let us go anywhere either." Wufei paused. Hesitated. Did it fit with the rest? "...Sally spends a few hours doing tests on me..."

"... Mm-hm...?"

Ah. There it was.

"How badly do they want their Dragon Clan genotype, I wonder?" he mused, staring at nothing.

There were a lot of possibilities coming to his mind now -- the clues still too vague to make anything out of them or let him know which way to jump, but most of them very unpleasant. Why would a branch of the government be interested in abilities that -- if he had them, and it was only a twenty-five percent chance at best -- were so weak he'd never noticed them in over twenty years of life?

"We do tend to see conspiracies everywhere," Heero commented, and lifted his sandwich to his mouth.

Wufei made a face a him. "Thank you for this vote of confidence, Yuy. What do you think it is about?"

"Maybe they just want to ask you politely. For Science." He quirked an eyebrow, mocking; Wufei glared mildly. So he was something of a geek about the socio-political implications. Like Yuy could talk. "But Une is just as suspicious as you are, so she's researching them before she gives her permission to accost you. Mere formalities."

"Do you believe that's likely?"

"No."

Wufei rolled his eyes, and started stretching his leg to kick him, but then he wondered if that counted as footsie and stopped immediately. He could see Heero had noticed his aborted movement, but he picked up his own sandwich and ignored the questioning arch of Heero's eyebrow.

It felt like he was running away, and he'd never been the kind of man who cut himself much slack about dealing with the unpleasant things in life. He breathed out, put the sandwich down again, and turned on his seat to face his partner.

"Listen, Yuy. This evening, the spar. Is it a date?"

"Do you want it to be a date?" Heero asked, as if asking whether Wufei liked ketchup with his fries.

"Yuy, goddamnit. Take it seriously!"

Heero looked at him calmly, almost like he wasn't even noticing the depth of Wufei's frustration. At least he gave the topic his attention, but the lack of gravity still bothered Wufei.

"It's not life or death. I'm taking it as seriously as it needs to be taken. Do you want it to be a date?"

Wufei tried to formulate the right words, and couldn't come up with them. "That isn't even -- Yuy! I can't lie to Mariemeya."

Heero started frowning, a faint line between his eyebrows that Wufei couldn't decide was annoyance or hurt. His voice stayed mild and almost pleasantly neutral. "So don't."

Wufei growled. Argh! "How was I supposed to guess you were serious?" he demanded, the words out of his mouth before he could fully realize they were true. "It came up as a way to get me out of being hit on by a fourteen-year-old!"

Heero gave a quiet snort. "I'll work on my timing next time I ask you out."

Wufei glared at him, face burning. "You do that, _boyfriend_."

At the door, someone choked.

"Sally," Heero greeted. Suddenly Wufei felt like turning around and facing the door even less, which he wouldn't have thought possible only a second ago.

Bracing himself, he looked back; Sally Po stood in the open doorway, blinking owlishly.

"... Ah... Did I interrupt...?"

"Po. Good afternoon. What do you want?" Wufei asked briskly, pretending very hard that he wasn't blushing. He was going to _kill_ Yuy.

Sally gathered herself, bemusement replaced with determined good cheer. "Good news! Commander Une approved your trip. Here are two tickets for L2 -- you'll land on colony L2-V0824 instead of L2-V0350 -- that's where Kamenov is, right? But you can catch a shuttle once you're up there. Funds will be sent to your usual accounts."

Wufei accepted his ticket and his mission orders, baffled. Just like that? He checked his ticket. "... Sally, the ship leaves in less than three hours -- that leaves us one hour to go home and pack."

She nodded sympathetically. "You'd better hurry up then."

"What's going on?" Heero asked, and joined Wufei in frowning at their superior and friend. First Une kept not having the time to review their proposition, and now they were suddenly in a hurry? There was something fishy going on there. Neither of them budged.

Sally sighed, stepped fully inside the room, and closed the door behind her. "We need you to trust us," she said quietly. "Can you do that?"

There was something here. Something big. Something huge. And it was about him, because Sally had looked at him just a tiny bit longer than at Heero.

He opened his mouth, but Sally grimaced faintly, and Wufei stopped there.

" _Please_. Don't ask."

Heero's hand touched his upper arm; Wufei broke eye contact with Sally. His partner looked grim, displeased, already thinking a mile a minute.

"... Wufei... Let's get out of here."

Because for all they knew it was turning into a trap, all ready to snap closed on them. Wufei closed his eyes briefly, took a deep breath, and nodded. He would demand answers later. He followed Heero off the couch, folding the paperwork with quick, precise gestures, wondering if things were bad enough that Sally would suggest they not take the main exit.

He was in the process of picking up his bag, still bent over, when a word jumped at him out of the hurried babble of the TV.

A number really. L5-A0206 -- one that still meant 'home' to him.

The agriculture show had been interrupted in the middle; an announcer in a rumpled suit was speed-walking through a crowd, the camera bouncing after him. Airport? Spaceport? His eyes shone with maniacal intensity -- the face of a man who could already see the scoop of his career.

 _"Preventers operation,"_ Wufei caught through the whine of a shuttle touching down in the background. Ambulances were waiting around a Preventers spaceship, security milling about.

"Wufei--"

In the reflection of the screen, Sally reached for him. He snatched the remote from the couch and turned up the sound.

_"--existence of Newtypes wasn't news for the so-called Dragon Clan, a group of Chinese supremacists in exile --"_

"Wufei!"

On the screen they were starting to wheel out gurneys; the cameraman zoomed effortlessly. One limp, unresponsive woman came into view, then another, and another -- their ages varying, but all with bronze-gold skin and inky hair, all looking like they could have been his neighbors. His family. His --

_"-- using comatose women of their own clan to create more powerful --"_

A hand caught his elbow, large and rough, holding him tight enough that it didn't matter if his knees wouldn't lock.

_"--many years, test-tubes children whose parents believed to be theirs turned out to have Dragon Clan members as their true genetic donors. The children all possess Newtype gene sequences..."_

He listened -- he could do nothing but. Listened and watched as the camera panned across the unconscious bodies of the women as orderlies quickly loaded them up in ambulances. Preventers agents had noticed the reporter and were hurrying to meet him or hide the victims.

It was too late, though -- the camera had seen enough.

Wufei had seen enough.

"Sally," he said, and was vaguely surprised at how toneless his voice sounded.

She was swearing; he could count on the fingers of one hand the times he'd heard her swear like that and mean it. Something about 'leaks' and 'too early'.

"Sally --"

She grabbed his shoulders, forced him to turn to face her. She was still taller than he was, would always be. He couldn't even tell what was on her face, fear or grief or anger, but it was bad. He couldn't make himself care about her right now.

"You have a mission, Agent Chang. You have three hours. Pack up. Leave. This doesn't concern you."

Shock left him then, replaced by rage, and he slapped her hands away. "How on _Earth_ does this not concern me?!"

"Were you involved in it?" she snapped back.

"Of course not!"

"Then you're not concerned. Now leave. Yuy, take your partner out of here."

"I'm--" _The closest thing they have to next of kin_ , he wanted to say, (or maybe _her husband_ ,) but then he understood that Sally was perfectly aware. That she still wanted him gone, gone, gone.

He pointed at the screen, shaking with rage, Heero's hands on his shoulders the only thing that kept him steady.

"You don't get it, how can you want me gone--"

Sally shook her head no, harshly. "Wufei. _You have no involvement in this affair_. If you think you do, _you're wrong_. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

He stared at her, hardly believing his ears. Or her expression, fierce and a little desperate. She stole the remote from his hand, switched channels, and turned up the sound until the TV yelled, silly little jingles about candy and rainbows. She stepped in his space, so he could hear her anyway.

"Do you want me to tell you how the conversation would go right now? Here, that's how. The Dragon Clan is a gathering of evil gene-butchering _supremacists_ who wanted to breed _mutants_ to use as _sleeper-cell terrorists_ against the rest of the world. And you _had_ to be part of it."

"What? I was fourteen--"

She cut him off with a knifelike jerk of her hand, eyes hard and determined. "You were old enough for a Gundam. Tell me, Agent Chang, why did you really come to Earth? What was your true purpose within Operation Meteor?"

Sally breathed out slowly. Wufei could only stare, speechless.

"Wufei, you are a very tempting scapegoat. Don't give them an excuse. There's nothing you could do anyway, so go home, get packed, go and do your job. We'll deal with things here. Alright?"

Heero's hands tightened on his shoulders. Wufei wanted to lean into them, let him take his weight. But he couldn't. He straightened up. He had to stand on his own two feet.

"... Let go, Yuy."

Heero's hands fell away slowly, and he stepped to his side, but Wufei ignored him.

"So will you go now?" Sally asked with quiet urgency. The TV was still so loud he had to read her lips. He nodded, more a jerk of the head than anything else.

"Will you send us more info while we're in transit?" Heero asked.

Sally looked conflicted. "We were under orders to keep you out of this..."

"It's too late now," Heero retorted.

Sally sighed, crossed her arms tight as if for warmth. "Fine. Just hurry up. Be elsewhere for a while. And if anyone asks you, be horrified that such a small minority of fanatics could do something so dreadful, and the rest of the clan certainly wasn't --"

"They committed mass suicide rather than calling their weapon to heel," Wufei snapped back. "By your standards they were all dreadful fanatics."

He grabbed his backpack and stormed out, unable to stomach anything more. Behind him, he could hear Heero's voice; "Yes, I'll keep an eye on him."

Yes, keep an eye on him indeed.

Sally had known. Had Heero known too? No, no, he would have told him, he wouldn't have assumed Wufei didn't deserve to know, no matter how much of a sucker punch it was.

Comatose women. Test-tube children all possess Newtype sequences. The Dragon Clan, a Chinese supremacist group...

He was standing in front of his car in the underground parking lot and didn't even remember the trip. In the reflection of the window he could see Heero on his left, two steps behind, watching the keys in Wufei's hand. He wondered if Heero was thinking of taking them from him.

"I'll meet you at the airport," Wufei said in as normal a voice as he could manage.

For a second and then two, he thought Heero would say no, and take him home, and keep watch until they were in the air, up in space, with no way back.

"Alright."

Wufei waited until the Heero reflection disappeared before he opened his car.

He went home, and packed his clothes, and packed his gun, and downloaded the hospital blueprints.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have one more chapter to post (sometime next week, I think) and then it'll be end of part 1, and start of SPECTACULARLY STALLED WRITER. Blargh.

Heero could tell Wufei hadn't expected to see him waiting at the bottom of the stairs. The man didn't slow down long, just one step out of synch, but his jaw tensed and his shoulders squared, bracing for confrontation.

Heero checked his inner clock and nodded. "If we walk fast, we can catch the next bus to the hospital."

Wufei stopped walking then, a couple of steps over the landing.

"Yuy..."

Heero didn't want to discuss things right now. 'Do you mean you already know how stupid I'm going to be?' 'Do you mean you're coming with me?' There was nothing to say. He pushed away from the wall and opened the front door. Wufei was slowly taking another step down, though that looked more mechanical than deliberate.

He stepped off the stairs and went to him -- to Heero, not the door, but Heero stepped out into the street and started walking toward the bus stop, pretending he didn't know Wufei had meant to talk to him privately.

"Are you coming?" Heero asked, because he didn't want Wufei to ask him the same thing, because Wufei should have known the answer already.

Wufei seemed conflicted for a second; but then it was gone, and he caught up to Heero without even really looking at him. They walked in a silence heavy with things unsaid.

Heero had thought Wufei looked tired, a few days ago in the computer room, but now he looked beyond that. There was purpose in every single of his movements, but the kind Heero remembered from the war. The kind that saw a goal, and nothing afterward. A suicide bomber's narrow sense of purpose and consequences.

The bus ride took only fifteen minutes, and then they were just a block away from their goal. Almost two hours left to do what needed to be done, before they had to be at the spaceport; he'd worked with much tighter schedules. Heero walked with elastic steps, pretending to take in the sights, nothing but a normal young man on a stroll. Neither of them were in uniform; if he acted normal enough, he hoped the passersby wouldn't take much notice of the seething ball of negative emotions that was his partner. They didn't need to be remembered.

"What's the plan?" he asked casually, noting down the position of security cameras covering banks and shops and arranging to block their view of Wufei's more distinctive ponytail, more visibly Asian face.

Wufei twitched a shoulder in what was probably supposed to be a shrug. "I'll see when I get there."

Heero frowned a little. He'd make the contingency plans, then. It wasn't the war anymore, with guards everywhere; breaking out should not require explosives this time around. The difficult thing was to get into the no doubt guarded room where they kept the comatose women. If they knocked out personnel to impersonate them, that would burn down even more bridges than if they simply snuck in...

He wasn't sure such a little thing would matter in the long run, compared to the rest of their upcoming offenses.

"You can't come with me," Wufei said under his breath as the hospital entrance came into view.

Heero snorted. Smiled, fleetingly, at his own private joke. "You need someone who has experience driving ambulances."

Wufei glanced at him, single-minded focus on what was in front of him briefly broken. The reference seemed to puzzle him, but in the end he didn't ask. His gaze hardened. "I won't let you throw your career away for me, Yuy."

"Chang," Heero said almost pleasantly, "Shut up." He took the steps up to the hospital gate first, ending the conversation.

"Hey, Heero!"

Heero felt Wufei go tense behind him, and stepped in the middle before his partner could lead the Preventers plainclothes agent to a discreet corner and knock her out. " Natasha." She was carrying her gun; the cloth tented under her arm. Here on the job then. "Security detail?"

"Yeah, you wouldn't believe the number of reporters. Like those poor women are doing anything but lying there like slabs of meat."

Heero casually shifted his weight from one foot to the other, bumping into Wufei and hiding his clenched fist.

"Whatcha doin' here?"

"Dietrik roped me into bringing a care package to his aunt," he said, lifting his own backpack off his shoulder as if to point at something inside. He'd heard his lunch partner complain about the woman enough; he even remembered her name and room number. "Captain Matsumoto around?"

"Sure, this way."

Heero frowned a little, like he wasn't extremely happy. It wasn't a secret that they didn't get along much. The man was extremely sharp-minded, but either he had an anti-electronic power or sitting in front of a keyboard made his IQ flip to negative points. "Let's hope he misses us then. I'm still not done with his computer."

Natasha laughed. "Well, _I_ didn't see you."

Heero offered a small smile of thanks, and hoped she would stick to that story later on; he didn't want her to be reprimanded for not stopping them. He nodded a salute and walked away, Wufei on his heels. Dietrik's cousin was in an entirely different wing, but he was betting on the agent not checking.

"If Matsumoto sees us," Wufei said, and fell silent. Heero just nodded. If the man saw them, he was high enough in the command chain that there was a good chance he'd be aware they weren't supposed to be there. Hard to tell until they ran into him.

There was a Preventer guarding entry of the ward, but the man was another Heero knew on sight, and he was on the phone; he gave them a very professional look-over and a little nod of acknowledgement, but didn't interrupt his apparently urgent conversation.

"His partner?" he said under his breath. He couldn't locate the other half of what should have been a pair.

Wufei tilted his head toward him. "He was talking about a press conference."

Ahh. Then they would have to gamble that it meant the absent partner had gone there to help. Heero hoped it would drain away enough of the security detail.

Soon they would reach an area of the hospital where visitors weren't welcome. Without breaking his stride, Heero walked into an empty nurse station, chose two lockers that would let him block the view of the camera with his back, and casually broke each lock with a twist of the wrist. The strain he hadn't prepared for made his joints ache, but he didn't let himself show it as he put on the scrubs. Wetting his hands at the sink, he combed his hair back. It wouldn't stay flat long, but perhaps long enough.

"It won't hold up to someone who knows either of us," he noted quietly.

Wufei gave a dismissive snort, like he hadn't even planned to bother. Heero clenched his jaw and tried to stuff his worry away. He couldn't. Wufei looked too... He didn't know.

Too dull, too flat. Heero trusted Wufei at his back in most situations, but everyone had a breaking point; and he didn't know if Wufei would implode and crumble, or explode -- if he broke outward he wouldn't go down alone. Heero didn't know how to tip the balance, or which would be the least damaging option.

The thought came to him, then.

"Wufei -- the press conference. If they're having it in the hospital, there's still time to go on record as official next of kin. Maybe we can influence the spin the media puts on this."

The rage suddenly burning in Wufei's eyes refused to be reasoned with. "No," he snarled.

Heero growled right back, wishing he could grab him by the shoulders and shove him against the wall -- but the last thing they needed was Security dropping by to stop a fight. "Stop _reacting_. Start _thinking_. Tell me why not."

"You didn't have to come with me," Wufei hissed -- just enough control left to keep from raising his voice. "I don't need your help, I don't want your help--"

Heero grabbed him by the collar and kissed him, and thought it might attract just as much attention as a fight, and didn't care enough. It wasn't a nice kiss, just a quick, harsh way to startle him out of it, one that wouldn't end in violence like shaking him or throwing water at his face would have.

"That's not up for debate," Heero said, hard and uncompromising. "Talk to me."

Wufei shook off his brief moment of shock, walls coming back up. "Shouldn't you have asked that first?"

He should have, except there had been no obvious other possibility, nothing Wufei would have considered. The press conference was an option he hadn't known existed at the time. He didn't want to let Wufei sidetrack him though. "Stop stalling, someone will come."

Wufei clenched and opened his fists, breathing out slowly. "... Because then those Health Ministry people will spring the trap, and I'll be buried in red tape, and perhaps even thrown in _prison_ , and I won't have any options at all." He sneered, but his voice was more resentful than furious. "Une must have her reasons to want me out of reach."

He sounded wholly unconvinced, but that was good enough for Heero. At least he was aware that there was more going on there than Une simply being afraid of his reaction. Une was a lot of things, some of them quite negative, but she wasn't cowardly; even if she'd been persuaded that Wufei would go on a murderous rampage she still would have told him in person. That she hadn't could only mean there were other dangers there.

"... As long as you don't forget you have allies inside the system."

Wufei stared at him as if he had totally missed the point, and that was a look Heero hadn't seen aimed at him, ever. He tensed, taken aback.

"I went to her burial," Wufei said in a quiet, precise way Heero didn't like. "I went to her burial, and threw earth on her casket, and _it was empty_."

His rage seemed to coalesce, harden into a lump of hate and determination.

"I don't _care_ what their reasons are. Nothing is ever going to be good enough. I don't care what's the trap, or why. I don't care why they think they have jurisdiction. They don't. She's mine."

Heero nodded slowly, surrender more than agreement.

He didn't even mention that Wufei would lose his job, and probably worse. Wufei cared about his job -- cared about the things he could do thanks to it -- but not at that price. And he was running on emotion and not logic, and Heero wanted to tell him to stop, slow down, find out what everyone really wanted, make a real plan -- but he would never wait that long.

Heero had known it from the start -- that Wufei was about to make a spectacular mess of his life. He resigned himself to let the occasion that represented the press conference slip away untried.

Wufei turned away from him, staring straight ahead, pride pulling his spine ramrod straight.

"You don't have to stay."

Heero snorted. He'd never been half as attached to the Preventers as Wufei was. The only bothersome thing was that he'd gotten used to his government-issued Heero Yuy ID. "I don't have to do a lot of things. Let's go."

No one stopped them; the few orderlies they saw looked too harried to let their eyes and curiosity wander. Wufei and Heero matched their pace and attitude to seem like they belonged and knew perfectly well where they were going. Heero didn't, but they would find a clue -- ah. He dived into an open cupboard, pulling Wufei after him. Just past the angle of the corridor he could hear angry voices.

"--on't talk to me about 'life first'!"

Doctors, most likely -- orderlies didn't walk with quite that decisive, proprietary note to their steps.

"Those women were used as living incubators. How is that not horribly _wrong_?"

Heero stole a glance at Wufei, but his face seemed carved in stone, offering no hint of reaction.

"I'm not saying it isn't --"

"They _died_ , Karl, they died and instead of letting them go, they hooked up their bodies to machines to force their hearts to keep beating and they _bred_ them! That's just -- that's just... I can't even imagine why on Earth no one's pulled the plug yet. If there's anything left of them in there, they would thank us for ending it."

"... What if we unplug and they don't die?"

The first doctor's voice quieted down, went tense and cagey. "Perhaps it would be a kindness to slip up with a dosage."

"Shit, Armand, you know the policy. If a patient isn't dying on their own, and they're not in a state to ask to speed it up --"

"...Yeah. I know. I just... Feel bad for them."

"Lying," Wufei whispered, eyes hard.

Heero arched an eyebrow. There had been something subtly off in the man's voice, but he hadn't identified it.

"Might be the truth, but not the whole truth." Wufei tilted his head. "...Afraid. Afraid of them."

"Them?" Heero asked, not sure he had understood right.

"The patients."

He had understood right then, but it didn't make any sense. The patients themselves, not the criminals who had been using them or the fanatics who might be coming after them? But newtype or not, there wasn't a lot a comatose person could do--

 _Shit_.

Not a lot, apart from waking up.

Heero could see the second it hit Wufei; he swayed on his feet, hand shooting out to press against the wall. He breathed out a denial, more to himself than to Heero. "They said brain dead. Vegetables--"

Heero grabbed his arm to keep him up. "You said he's afraid. Means his perspective's skewed. He's not rational about it."

Wufei nodded mechanically, but Heero could tell he was still reeling.

"... Are they gone?"

Heero nodded, and peeked out of the cupboard to confirm. The corridor was empty; he slipped out quickly. There would be guards by the observation room, and perhaps someone inside to monitor vitals, and they couldn't afford to infiltrate discreetly anymore. Wufei wouldn't wait that long.

They waited until the camera was turned away, and swept through the last corridor in total silence. Wufei caught the Preventer guard with a precise chop to the back of the neck before the man could fully turn around while Heero dispatched the second and slipped in the room, checking for threats. He found no one inside; dumped his colleague on the floor in a corner, and then closed the door neatly the second Wufei had dragged his own unconscious body in, almost catching the man's shoes.

The room was more like a dormitory -- eight beds, four on each side, full of tubes and beeping machines. Only seven of the beds were occupied.

Heero was still scanning their faces for the proper age range when Wufei moved. He went straight to her, as if he'd already known where she was.

She was roughly their age, but Heero couldn't tell more, if she was eighteen or twenty-three, what kind of personality she'd had, whether she'd been pretty. She was too thin, cheekbones and wrists and elbows too visible. Her straw-like, dull black hair had been braided on the side to get it out of the way, but a few locks fell across her closed eyes. She didn't look asleep, he could tell even around the respirator mask. Features too slack, ashen complexion... She looked gone. Not really dead, just -- gone. Heero forced himself to look away. He turned Wufei's unconscious Preventer on his side, so the man wouldn't choke, and started walking through the room, checking the other women's clipboards and what he could understand of the machines attached to them.

"... Nataku..."

Heero kept his back to his partner, but the machines could as well have been mirrors. He saw Wufei's shaking hand take hers, his body slowly, so slowly curve over hers, staring at what he could see of her face.

Heero didn't know much about Chang Meiran, only that it had been an arranged marriage, that they'd started out hating each other, that she'd died on him, and that Wufei hadn't stopped trying to make himself worthy ever since.

It looked like he wasn't ever going to let go, knuckles white, leaning over her like he was trying to curl around her body, become her shell, her cradle. Heero stood in silence, knowing he'd been forgotten. He should have left, let Wufei have some privacy, but there was nowhere to go.

"You can't break down now," Heero said quietly. "There's no time."

There was no response for so long he thought there wouldn't be any. And when it came it was raspy, choked up, and he hated it. "...Ah. Yes."

He took the time to do a full circuit around the room before he joined his partner, time enough for Wufei to get a hold of himself -- but even someone who didn't know him could have seen he wasn't alright at all. Heero didn't comment, just picked up Meiran's clipboard and read the doctor's notes.

"--Oh. That's new."

Wufei blinked slowly and tore his eyes away from her. "What is it?"

"She's in a persistent vegetative state--" Wufei flinched; Heero continued, not knowing whether it was really kind of him to say so. But Wufei would want the whole truth, no matter if it broke him. "But it isn't full brain death."

Wufei blinked again, like the words didn't really make sense. "... _Full_ brain death? What the hell does that even mean?"

Heero frowned, and read more, trying to find the meaning through the jargon. "The activity in a lot of sectors of her brain is very low -- sporadic... But enough dark areas have thrown off a few sparks at some point that they can't say 'dead'." He looked up, meeting Wufei's eyes with a sober look of his own. "There's still an overwhelming probability that it will never get better, and that if she ever wakes up she will be severely mentally impaired." He glanced at her body then, thin like a stick, muscle melted away. He could see no curled limb, no visible atrophy, but that didn't mean her motor functions would fare any better.

Wufei was quiet as he took everything in, once again staring at his wife's face.

"What do you want to do?"

Wufei didn't even seem to think about it. "Take her out of here." He paused, closed his eyes. His thumb was rubbing a little circle on the back of her hand; she didn't react. "Then -- let her body decide." He would have sounded almost normal, voice quiet but steady, if Heero hadn't seen him swallow. "If she wants to go..."

Heero nodded briskly, pulled his laptop out of his backpack, and went about arranging their escape and abduction.

+

Heero left the medical machines and the one elevator they needed alone; but all the rest he turned off, gates stuck open, lights off, security cameras dead with their memories wiped clean. Meiran's respirator and the cardiac and brainwaves monitors were attached to the bed and ran on a small generator, and all her prescription drugs rested in a convenient basket with her name on it; wheeling her to the waiting elevator was the easiest thing in the world.

It was so dark in the corridors that everyone else stuck to the walls. Heero just rushed the bed through, working on his memory of the hospital layout. Wufei worked with him in almost perfect synch to make the turns, using his weight to redirect their momentum whenever Heero pulled right or left. They clipped a couple of orderlies, but those yelled loud enough that Heero didn't have to worry he'd broken anyone's neck.

No one stopped them. But when they reached the waiting elevator, the little emergency lights lining the inside were much closer than he'd anticipated.

"Shit--"

Wufei grabbed the foot of the bed and threw his whole body back, heels skidding on the linoleum. Heero couldn't do the same; he was still busy controlling the spin to make sure the edge of the elevator door didn't broadside them.

It was going to hurt a bit.

Heero put his feet on a bar over the wheels, turned his back on the approaching wall, and took the impact against the elevator's bottom panel. The elevator trembled, metal banging loudly.

"Yuy!" Wufei pulled the bed back, freeing him.

Heero tried not to breathe in too fast; he'd done his best to dampen the shock, but he'd still been caught in the ribs by a metal edge and the wind had been briefly knocked out of him. At least it hadn't broken anything. Done in by a bed -- that would look nice on his rap sheet. "--I'm fine. Close the door."

Wufei slammed his hand on the button, quickly looked over Meiran's body to make sure it hadn't been disturbed, and then stared hard at Heero over the length of the bed. He didn't call Heero an idiot, so Heero didn't have to answer that they'd needed some way to blunt the impact, now hadn't they. The pain would go away in a minute.

"Status?"

Heero's heel had slipped over the bar, and his ankle ached slightly, but he couldn't afford to have his mobility reduced. When he put weight on it, it held on without protesting too much; it would be good enough. "... Acceptable."

Wufei snorted, and might have said more, but a lock of hair fell across Meiran's face and his attention was pulled back to her in the second. Heero looked away and slipped past Wufei so he'd be the first to come out when the door opened.

"Yuy..."

Heero didn't look at him; but his peripheral vision saw him anyway, dark head bowed over the unmoving body. "Hm?"

"You could still leave," Wufei said, without looking at him. "Tell people you weren't involved."

Heero snorted, making Wufei look up and frown at him. "No, I couldn't."

And while Wufei was still looking straight at him, he reached out and plucked out his hair band. Wufei blinked, a hand rising to his freed hair.

"Hey --"

"You look less distinctive like that," Heero lied.

The elevator pinged and came to a stop. Heero slipped the hair band around his wrist like a bracelet and stepped out.

The elevator opened into a small lobby of sorts, but only the emergency lights were on. It was dark enough that the nurse didn't have enough light to see Heero's face in detail when he walked up to her and pressed stolen chloroform-soaked cloth against her face.

He dropped his backpack on Meiran's lap. "Find a big car," he said to Wufei, and walked straight out of the lobby. There weren't many people there, maybe just a couple of orderlies and a family getting ready to leave. He could see security guards out by the gate, gesturing wildly at each other as they argued about the security barrier, stuck in the up position. They hadn't realized it was sabotage yet; good. Heero didn't glance back at Wufei as he walked through the rows of cars, looking for an appropriate target.

He slipped a smoke bomb under a car and kept walking, casual. A few rows later, he crouched to fix shoelaces he didn't have and stole two license plates, yanking them free hard enough that the screws were sent flying. Twenty seconds left on the bomb. He mussed his hair to one side Noin-style, ditched the scrubs in a corner, and started toward the exit.

A big minivan started pacing him less than two meters away from the gate and the bickering rent-a-cops. Heero opened the door and climbed inside; he was still in the process of sitting down when the smoke bomb exploded and car alarms started howling.

There was swearing, people running away and out, smoke filling the parking lot; the cops raced in to help people evacuate.

Wufei calmly stepped on the gas pedal and melted into the traffic.

"Find somewhere to park," Heero said as he tugged the corner of the plates out of his shirt. Wufei glanced at them and nodded tersely. He didn't say a word.

Heero had never known Wufei to be extremely talkative, especially not on missions, but there was usually a different quality to his mission quiet, a kind of hunting-cat stillness that was nothing but patience and readiness. The white-knuckled grip Wufei had on the wheel and the sharp, twitchy glances he cut everything that moved on the street made all the difference.

Heero glanced behind him, in the dim interior of darkened windows. The car must belong to an education center, he thought, or maybe a huge family. Nothing else would have necessitated three rows of seats, or had their floor littered with candy wrappers and toys. Wheels tucked in, Meiran's hospital bed fit neatly over the folded seats, though she couldn't have sat up without knocking her head on the roof. She wasn't going to sit up anyway; the point was moot.

They stopped on someone's tree-lined driveway and Heero screwed the stolen plates on; then he went up to the driver's door and looked soberly up at Wufei.

"I'll drive. You get in the back."

"I can drive, Yuy," Wufei snapped with surprising anger.

It wasn't really Heero Wufei was lashing out at, he knew that. He was wounded, and he didn't want anyone to come close.

He made Heero want to reach out and -- he didn't know, he'd never really had to comfort anyone who was anything like Wufei. It had been -- not easy, but easier with Relena, when she came back home wearing the world on her shoulders, knowing she could never do enough to help everyone; she'd been the one who came to him, who asked 'please just let me hold you' and clung when he held her back.

She'd been the one who got back up once he'd held her enough, and smiled and said things about setbacks not being failures. He'd never had to find the words.

Friends would only accept different kinds of help anyway, but there too Heero was out of his depth. Trowa hadn't required more than someone to sit with him, almost shoulder to shoulder, for him to sigh, relax, and say "thank you." Dietrik needed even less, a dry comment to make him laugh despite himself, and there he was all better again. Neither of those strategies would work on Wufei -- not now.

"I know you can drive," he said simply, and kept waiting.

Wufei would never let Heero hold onto him, never listen when Heero said 'break down if you want; I'll put you back together.'

Heero hadn't even known he wanted a chance to say it.

They looked at each other for a few moments too long; Wufei looked away first, and for a too long second Heero didn't know whose pride Wufei was trying to spare, if he just wanted space more than to save face or if he'd seen something he shouldn't have in Heero's eyes.

"... Fine." Wufei unbuckled his seatbelt and slipped between the seats.

Heero climbed into the driver's seat and drove off, trying not to watch as his partner slipped into the narrows space between the bed and the window and took his place at the unconscious young woman's side.

The backseat windows had already been darkened as much as possible, but Heero didn't feel like dealing with the rest of the world, so he dimmed the rest.

By now the hospital must be in the process of reversing his hack; he had made it easy on purpose, unwilling to mess with the place for a longer time than strictly necessary. The security camera feeds were wiped clean, but the Preventer agent who'd seen them would be asked if she'd seen anything suspicious, and if they were unlucky she would think to mention two off-duty agents. Hopefully not, but they couldn't count on it. He didn't drive fast, staying slightly under the speed limit, but he didn't waste time either.

When he checked the time he realized only twenty minutes had gone past between their arrival to the hospital and their escape. They still had a hour and a half left before the shuttle they were supposed to get on left.

"How are her vitals?"

"The same," Wufei said, like he didn't know whether that was good or awful.

Heero wasn't sure either. If Chang Meiran died... He had no doubt they would be tried for murder if caught, and even with attenuating circumstances it would be a mess. And then there was the mysterious plot Une had been trying to protect them from.

If Meiran didn't die... then what would they _do_ with her? She needed long-term care and the places ready and willing to give it weren't exactly hard to track down; a brand new comatose Jane Doe would be conspicuous. An underground hospital, maybe, but those were disreputable enough, low on funds, and likely staffed with people Heero wouldn't entrust a dog to. Sweeper clinic-ship? Most of Heero and Wufei's connections to them had come through Duo Maxwell, and Heero didn't like depending on Maxwell's contacts when they didn't have a clue what the man himself was up to.

It might be their best bet anyway...

He almost asked Wufei for input, but when he glanced back through the mirror he saw a bowed head, black hair falling in loose locks on the sleeping woman's face, and all the grief in the world in the line of his shoulders.

Heero kept on driving, silent.

"We should switch cars," Wufei said eventually, startling Heero.

His voice was raspy; made Heero think he was hearing too much, more than Wufei would ever choose to show, a glimpse into his feelings that didn't exist because of Heero at all. It wasn't a gift, an opening; it was accidental voyeurism.

He started looking for a parking place, locking it away.

He found one behind a shed, beside a small truck. The attached house looked empty. It was a simple matter to park on the driveway, disable the security system and break in. He helped Wufei get the bed out of the minivan and rolled it to the back of the truck. Breaking into the truck was similarly easy. He'd had so much training for that it was simple as breathing; he didn't even need to watch his hands. He watched them anyway.

They emptied the back of the truck, put the bed inside, and drove off again. Meiran didn't stir; her vitals didn't change.

"Find somewhere to park."

If Heero had thought he was hearing too much before, things that weren't for him to hear, that was nothing compared to now. There was a sort of dead finality in Wufei's voice, dull and almost hopeless.

Almost. Wufei was going to keep hoping until she flatlined. After that... Heero didn't know. But it would be better if they were parked.

"Wufei..."

"There's no use dragging it out, is there?" he said, not really like a question. "No use waiting."

Heero slipped over the seats and stood in the narrow space at the head of the bed. 'I could do it instead', he wanted to say, and didn't even know where the foolish impulse was coming from. Like Wufei would allow anyone to offer him such a stupid, useless crutch, such fake comfort. 'You didn't kill her with your own hands in the end'-- hah. It wouldn't change a thing. That wasn't the main source of pain by ten miles.

Wufei closed his eyes, briefly, gathering himself, and then he forced them wide open and watched his wife's face as he cut off the respirator and took away the oxygen mask.

Stillness, lungs emptying and not filling again. Oxygen deprivation usually left irreparable damage as early as the third minute, or sometimes earlier -- though that only mattered if the damage that kept her unconscious was fixable in the first place. Perhaps it was long moot. If her body didn't notice the lack of oxygen and start breathing on its own after thirty seconds then it wasn't going to.

Wufei was caressing her face, just a brush of fingertips, infinitely tender. Heero counted in his head, thirty seconds, twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven. _Only twenty-five seconds left before she's gone_ , he thought; twenty-two, twenty-one, _but she's already,_ eighteen, seventeen, _already, she's not breathing_ , fourteen, _she was fourteen_ \--

She'd been fourteen when she died, and Wufei was grieving all over again except this time it would be worse, and none of it was remotely fair.

He leaned over the bed and took the girl's other hand, limp and cool like a dead thing, and he squeezed, as if she might even feel it. _Breathe, damn it_. Eleven. Ten. _Breathe_. Eight. _Breathe_. Six. _Breathe, because Wufei might stop with you, **breathe already** \--_

\-- Heero leaned on the panel at his back, graceless, heavy. Wufei didn't notice, transfixed by a few strands of his hanging hair that shivered softly.

Three, two, one, and Heero was counting in negatives before he realized it was useless now.

"...She's..."

Wufei choked on the words like he couldn't wrap his mind around them, and it hurt in Heero's chest like an echo, but Heero could have taken that kind of pain a hundred times over without saying a word. He shook off the dizziness and reached for her; Wufei was still too frozen to do it. Her ribs didn't move, but when Heero placed a hand on her abdomen, he felt it expand minutely under his hand.

"She's breathing," Heero confirmed quietly, and counted once again to time her. One minute went by, and then two. In-out, in-and-out and out, a hitch, in-in-out. In and out. In and out. "... Steady now."

"She's breathing," Wufei repeated, and then he started to laugh.

Then Heero was at his side, and his hand was clenched on Wufei's shoulder, and Wufei's arm was around Heero's back, fingers digging into his spine as he pressed his forehead against Heero's ribs, and he wasn't too sure how that had happened so fast. Wufei's body shook, crazed chuckles edged with pain and devastating relief.

"...She's breathing."

"Don't cry now!" Heero said past the knot lodged in his own throat. "Just don't -- your eyes, people will remember if it shows."

"I'm not crying," Wufei snarled, head still bowed against Heero's chest. "I know it doesn't mean anything -- just autonomic functions, she could stop anytime; it doesn't mean anything."

Heero would have believing him more if his voice hadn't been so thick, almost burbly. "Yeah," he said quietly, and clenched his fingers into a fist to stop himself from slipping them in Wufei's hair.

Chang Meiran kept lying there, unmoving, brainwaves unchanged.

"... Ah. Sorry."

Wufei straightened up, not looking at him; Heero let his arms fall at his sides and felt strangely empty.

"We need to get her out of here. If they catch up -- she won't be safe."

Heero nodded in quiet agreement. A known newtype, from such a panic-inducing affair, utterly unable to even call for help... It would only take a prejudiced coward ten minutes and a pillow.

"They'll track this truck before long, and it would be too conspicuous to take the train with a huge box," Wufei muttered, a hand rubbing Meiran's limp arm thoughtlessly. "We need a better way..."

Heero looked down her body, frowning as he thought. It would be a good idea to keep the oxygen mask around just in case, though she didn't need it at the moment; but the bed itself was unnecessary. "About that... I might have an idea."

Heh. If it failed, it would fail spectacularly. At least Wufei had started including him in his 'we's again.


	6. Chapter 6

Heero's cell phone rang as they were still waiting in line to register for the flight; Wufei was twitchy enough that his hand jumped to his holster before he could think twice.

"At the spaceport."

Heero's face was blank and expressionless; Wufei tensed up.

"He's beside me. Do you need to talk to him?"

Ah. So the Preventers had finally gotten around to checking on him. Wufei was honestly surprised it had taken so long. He turned discreetly so he could see the rest of the huge room, making sure there were no agents sneaking up on them. No one in sight seemed to be paying them any kind of attention.

But as long as the shuttle wasn't in the sky, they could still be pulled aside and arrested.

"No, I picked him up. We took the bus. Why?"

Wufei kept an eye on Heero's face as he talked, but he looked as cryptic as ever -- slightly bored, for someone who didn't know him enough to notice the intense watchfulness of his gaze. It wasn't hard to guess who he was talking with -- either Une or Sally.

"We're boarding in ten minutes. Should we take a later flight?"

That wasn't an option -- Meiran was already on board, strapped as carefully as possible inside a solid crate marked Preventers Equipment, Fragile, This Side Up, and a dozen other stickers. Wufei was already sick from being unable to keep an eye on her -- but to see her flying away to some distant colony while he was hunted down on Earth? No. He'd take that flight no matter what, but he knew going against orders would mean having to fight his way through L2 Preventers when they landed, no ifs or buts about it.

"Alright. I'll call you when we get there." Heero hung up.

"Yuy?"

Heero took in his tense shoulders and shook his head just a little bit. "It's fine." Stand down.

Wufei's shoulders sagged a little. No orders. No arrest.

They only needed another three and a half hours of confusion, and then the communication delay between Earth and the far side of the moon would give them enough of a lag to slip away before the local Preventers knew to pick them up. If they were lucky. If the shuttle wasn't late.

In the meantime they could get busted any second. Heero had been right; it was a risky gamble. But it was better than nothing. If they stayed on Earth, nothing they could get their hands on would go faster than the Preventers' planes. Unless Heero and Wufei stole one of those -- but it wasn't like there were a lot of places to park them discreetly.

More news broke when they were walking toward the space shuttle, scrolling up on someone's widescreen cellphone. A newly-familiar word caught his eye. The site had an article called "The Newtype Cuckoo Plan!" and contained a joint release of statement from the Health Ministry's Director Madison and Director Une of the Preventers. Something about "poor abused women" and "let them die with dignity."

The girl reading the news clicked away then, and he couldn't see more -- but then he'd seen enough, enough to make Heero elbow him and nudge his head down, a hand heavy on the back of his neck. It looked like a friendly grab but it was hard and uncompromising; he couldn't have bucked it if he'd wanted to. Wufei's unbound hair fell around his face like a curtain, and he breathed slowly and stared at the floor, trying to erase the fury from his face before someone noticed.

If there hadn't been that leak, he would have been in transit when the Earth Sphere learned the truth, learned about his dead wife's not-quite-corpse being used to cook up mutant children. And Une would have decided without him -- let the Health Ministry and the collective paranoia decide what to do with his Nataku.

And Meiran would never have breathed on her own ever again because it was more convenient for everyone to let her die a second time.

None of the victims had been officially identified. Perhaps Wufei would never have been notified at all.

Heero bumped against him. "Your ID," he said, handing in both their tickets.

Wufei made himself look up, and nodded with empty politeness, and tried not to look murderous. From the strange looks he was given, he didn't quite succeed.

They handed their Preventers badges and their guns and went through the metal detector; nothing beeped, no carrying permit came up wrong and invalid. They walked to the shuttle, and none of the other passengers talked to them. They strapped themselves in launch seats; no one burst in at the last minute to arrest them, and then the shuttle took off and that was that. Free for the next eight hours.

Free to wonder when the heads-up about two renegade agents would pass them and reach the L2 Preventers branch and how much time they would have to prepare. Free to wonder how long it would take for his wife to suffocate in that X-ray-proof crate where no one could find her.

She wasn't breathing a lot at the moment, he thought with cynicism. She'd last a while. Unless her body just stopped. Who knew?

Heero's foot bumped his ankle, hooked around it to get his attention. Wufei's knuckles were white on the armrest.

"Air sickness," he heard Heero tell someone, probably about him. He closed his eyes and turned his head away. Waste of a window, someone commented with a laugh.

"Shut up," he hissed between clenched teeth.

Heero's elbow found his ribs -- a pointed 'be polite, damn it'. "Migraine?" he prompted.

"...Yes. My apologies."

Voices fell to a murmur around him as he waited for takeoff to be over, for the shuttle to break atmo.

It was a night flight, sort of; they'd arrive at L2 at around five AM local hour, and some people liked to nap beforehand to reset their inner clocks. The tickets gave Heero and Wufei access to a narrow cabin with two bunk beds inserted into the wall; the second they were allowed to unbuckle their seatbelts Heero was taking his arm and herding him away from the launch seats.

Heero locked the door behind them, sat on the bottom bunk. Wufei wanted to pace, but he couldn't even take three whole steps before running into a wall, and that defeated the purpose. He sank on the seat that protruded from the opposite wall, only noticing that his hand was toying with the Preventers badge attached to his belt when he caught Heero staring at it.

"What?" he snapped, and pulled his hand away.

Heero leaned against the head of the bed, face neutral. "... I'm going to sleep. There's nothing else to do, and we need to rest while we still can."

Wufei glared at his partner. He knew that, did Heero think he didn't? But it was easy for him.

The second the thought came to him he felt ashamed. Heero was throwing away his career to help him do something that might ultimately be pointless. Something that was, to be frank, crazy to the point of being stupid.

Wufei hadn't set off thinking he was going to _save_ Meiran. He'd set off thinking he would take her body back and let her die where she ought to -- with someone who knew and respected her, not in an impersonal, sterile place where she was just the artificially-breathing carcass of a mutant Jane Doe.

She was part of his clan. She was his _wife_. The government had no right to decide anything about her -- health care, time of death, burial -- nothing. He hadn't set off thinking she was still somewhere in that useless, broken body. But it was her body, and she had been his wife, and he didn't care if what made her Nataku had fled away a long time ago.

It was ridiculous to take so many risks for an empty shell, something that would bring nothing good to anyone, something that would never let him be of help to the Preventers' cause ever again.

But now that broken body was breathing again. And some ridiculous part of him was starting to think in terms of 'she could wake up.' And if she woke up of course she would be herself and she would be fine and no, _no_ she wouldn't; nothing would be fine. Her body had wasted away, her brain had been damaged by lack of oxygen, her other organs ... who knew. Her personality might be irreparably excised of everything that made her Nataku. She wasn't going to just open her eyes one day and start demanding to know what he'd done to her Gundam.

Wufei's fingers found the Preventers badge again, rubbed against the hard edge. He couldn't start driving himself crazy with all the things that could go wrong and prevent her from getting better. It wasn't a matter of things not going wrong -- it was a matter of things that would need to somehow become better than neutral, than the five-year running status quo. People didn't suddenly wake up from a long-term coma for no reason, soap operas notwithstanding.

Movement caught in the corner of his eye. He'd been staring off into space again; he jerked his head back up.

Heero was taking off his jacket; but when he did that, his white button-up shirt cracked open.

"... Show me your ribs."

Heero blinked up at him, like he couldn't feel the bruise Wufei had just seen. "Hm?"

"Show me. We might have to tape them." He didn't put it past Heero to hide or ignore the pain; the way he'd dismissed the incident you could have thought he'd just nudged the bed.

Heero sighed slightly, as if he thought Wufei was worried for nothing, and tugged up the bottom of the shirt -- but then he winced and looked surprised, and Wufei felt vindicated.

He didn't feel vindicated long, because there was a deep purple bruise the size of his wide-open hand on Heero's ribcage.

"You're an idiot," he said, and tried not to think about the reason why Heero would fail to mention he needed medical assistance. Damn it, damn it.

"I honestly didn't think the bruising would get that bad." Heero poked the area, grimacing faintly. "It doesn't feel broken."

"Cracked?" Wufei gave his partner a mildly exasperated look.

Heero rolled his eyes, smiling faintly like he was pleased Wufei would think to ask, would know him well enough to be aware of the ways Heero usually avoided sharing inconvenient truths. "I don't think so."

Wufei looked away, breaking eye contact. "Let me check," he said tersely. If the bruise was deep enough that Heero couldn't even tell how damaged he was, it didn't matter whether the bone was cracked; it would hinder him anyway. Except Heero wouldn't _let_ himself be hindered, would move exactly as if he was just fine, and would probably end up with fully broken ribs.

"I'll be fine tomorrow."

"Don't make me hit you." Wufei glared up at him. "You're not immortal, damn it!"

"I don't think I'm immortal," Heero replied with cautious softness.

Wufei sneered back, knee-jerk reaction. "Oh, so you're just suicidal. That's much better."

The softness disappeared; Heero threw him an unimpressed look. "Do I really have to break out the pot and kettle metaphors?"

Wufei gritted his teeth and glared, opening his mouth to snap back; but Heero wasn't done, eyes narrowed, determined.

"I'm ready to do a lot for you, Chang, but I won't be your punching bag."

Wufei flinched, ground his teeth together. He wanted to snarl back, to yell, to push him around -- Yuy could defend himself. But it wasn't fair to him. It wasn't fair, but what was Wufei supposed to do with all that rage?!

His fist hit the wall. He wasn't so far gone he damaged himself; but it hurt enough to calm him down, a little.

" _Shit_."

It didn't hurt that much past the first flash of pain. He flexed his hand slowly, a muscle jumping in his jaw, waited for Heero to say something. 'Calm down' or 'Try to meditate it away' or god forbid, 'Want to talk about it?' Heero just stayed silent, waiting.

"How can you always stay so _calm_ ," Wufei said in the end, disbelieving and still angry.

"Someone has to."

Wufei expelled a long, noisy breath, and turned to face him once again. "Let's put analgesic cream on your ribs. We might not be able to fix them but there's no reason for you to be in pain."

Wufei crouched and rummaged through Heero's backpack for his first aid kit, because it gave him an excuse to ignore his partner. Heero took off his shirt and holster, dropped them on the bed, standing shirtless behind him.

Wufei's black hairtie was still wrapped around Heero's wrist like a bracelet.

Wufei pretended he hadn't noticed it. He took Heero's elbow and propped it on his own shoulder, to get his arm out of the way without strain, and he started rubbing the cream in. He was quick, thorough, professional. Impersonal. Heero deserved better, but Wufei just couldn't deal with it right now.

"... You're so _stupid_ ," he said quietly, and it wasn't only anger. Wasn't really anger at all.

"Yes, I am." Heero's voice was calm, thoughtful. "Because I'd do it all over again."

"Tell me that after we have to shoot our way through our coworkers," Wufei replied harshly. "People we've had _coffee_ with. After we spend ten years running and hiding, and having facial surgery after facial surgery and --" _she dies anyway_ "--you can never see Darlian again--"

"Wufei. I'd do it all over again."

Wufei stared frozen at the dark bruises under his hand, and the sticky cream on his fingers. _No_ , he wanted to say _, take it back, don't mean it -- idiot, idiot, idiot_.

But then Heero snorted and smirked down at him. "But I'd really like to see what could keep me from Relena."

Wufei closed his eyes, and chuckled despite himself as the moment broke. "Ridiculous." He sighed, looked up at his partner. "Nothing on Earth could stop you, huh."

Heero smiled faintly. "If she needed me? Nothing in the Colonies either."

"Braggart."

"It's not bragging if it's true."

Wufei laughed a little. "You're insufferable."

"You're just jealous."

There was something disturbingly tender in Heero's eyes, and Wufei's laughter died away. "Yes... I suppose that must be it." He let his hands fall, straightened up. "There. I'm done. We should get some sleep."

Wufei turned away and cleaned his hands of the excess cream on a paper towel.

"... Yeah. Goodnight, Chang."

Wufei waited until the rustles of cloth told him Heero was done arranging himself on his bunk, then he turned off the ceiling light and climbed up to his own bed without looking at him.

A hour later he was still wide awake.

The shuttle purred quietly, motors thrumming on a not-quite-sub-hearing level. Wufei couldn't hear anything else. In the bunk underneath his, Heero was still and quiet. Wufei strained to listen to his breathing, but the sounds didn't get that far.

Maybe he was dead, ribs broken, drowned in his own blood.

The thought was ridiculous.

Maybe Meiran was dead too, and _that_ thought wasn't. He couldn't hear her either, alone and stuck in a crate like so much luggage, tumbled up and down and around, suffocated under her own weight. He knew they'd secured her as much as possible, but the restrains might break.

He knew better than to sneak into the hold and check on her. They couldn't afford to behave in a suspicious way. He could act cold-bloodedly. His nerves would hold.

His sanity, he didn't know. He couldn't hear her breathe.

He slipped off his bunk, landed cat-light beside Heero's. Blue eyes cracked open, fuzzy with sleep. Looking at him.

Looking at him.

Meiran's eyes never looked at anything.

He crouched beside the bed slowly, felt the vibrations of the motors tremble up his bare feet. Heero looked at him still, waiting. His hand rested on the blankets, Wufei's hair band still wrapped around his wrist.

"Did you mean it?" Wufei asked, could ask, because right now it was the most important thing and yet the most pointless, the most irrelevant.

Heero just gave him a shrug, and an almost imperceptible nod.

"Sorry," Wufei said quietly.

"Shut up," Heero answered just as quietly; and slipped a hand under Wufei's loose hair, cupping the back of his neck. He pulled Wufei under the blankets. Wufei allowed it.

Their legs tangled in short, nervous twitches. Wufei's hands were clumsy, clenching too hard in between aborted attempts at petting. He just wanted to -- he didn't know. Think about other things. Not think at all.

Heero pushed him down on his back on the thin mattress and let the blankets cocoon them. Wufei tensed and dug his fingers into hard muscles; and then there were eyelashes brushing his cheek and a kiss, long and slow and intense, one that picked up speed and tongue and then teeth. He could feel Heero breathing in his mouth and pressing down on him.

At the end he went from release to sleep without having to think at all.

+

Heero woke when his cellphone caught the colony's communication field and beeped back to life. Wufei rested on his side, facing away from him; Heero watched the back of his head for a second.

He didn't regret the last night exactly, just like he didn't regret up and leaving his job and his official existence. Wufei had needed him. Heero could survive the consequences. He just wasn't going to like the backlash from Wufei very much, when he fully realized how much he owed Heero. Heero didn't see any of it in terms of debt, but he knew Wufei would.

Heero sighed and sat up. His ribs protested, startling a soft gasp out of him. The bruise was just as large as yesterday, and even uglier to look at, mottled purple and sickly yellow-green. Huh.

He slipped out of bed, put on his underwear and pants, checked the time. It was strange how tired he still felt; six hours of sleep should have helped more than that. Heh, maybe he was getting old. Twenty-one going on forty.

"Chang, ETA in twenty minutes," he said, and picked up his button-up shirt, turning his back to the bed. He was sure his partner had woken up before that; Wufei wasn't so tired that he wouldn't notice his mattress shifting under him.

Wufei didn't answer, but the sheets rustled as he moved to the edge of the mattress. Heero finished buttoning up his shirt and checked the news on his cellphone. The connection was sluggish, still a bit too far from the colony to pick up a regular signal.

"The kidnapping is on the news."

Wufei grunted an acknowledgement. Heero kept his back to the bed as casually as possible as his partner got dressed.

"Anything we need to know?"

"Hm. The full article won't load. They're probably going to detain us on arrival on principle, though."

Wufei made an irritated sound in the back of his throat and leaned on the upper bunk's ladder to yank on his shoes. "Likely. Especially once they find out we brought a crate."

Since he was dressed, Heero turned to face him again, face carefully neutral. "We need to slip away before -- " Ah. Heero tried his best, but there was still a noticeable break in the sentence. "--they find us."

"... What?"

Briefly he debated not answering, but that would only make it into a bigger deal. "Your hair." Heero moved his hand to the side of his own head, to illustrate. Bed hair.

Just-had-sex hair. Why had he even made the link? It had been nothing, he knew that, they both did. Just a distraction.

Wufei's expression, serious and a little tense, immediately went completely shuttered. He raked his fingers through his black locks, pulling them back against the back of his neck.

Heero's fingers tingled with the temptation to smooth down that stubborn lock of hair Wufei kept missing. And _that_ would be business as usual indeed. Stupid. "I suggest we leave before they pick us up," Heero said, a bit too brusque to be casual, and waited to see if Wufei clammed up any further.

"... Good suggestion. Emergency escape shuttles?"

Heero relaxed. "Could do, but with the beacon broadcasting our location we would have a short window to operate."

"And unless we're picked up in space by some other shuttle we can take over, we won't go far."

"Breaking her out of the hold would be awkward as well," Heero said, not sure how Wufei would take it.

Wufei didn't react; he'd probably thought of it first. "So we wait until we land. We can't leave the shuttle with the other passengers though."

Heero agreed. Passengers usually went to and from the shuttle via a plastic tube that acted as a corridor, to make sure they didn't stray anywhere they weren't supposed to go; there were no doors between the spaceport's public gathering areas and waiting rooms and the behind-the-scenes loading, landing or repair docks -- or none that weren't heavily guarded. They had to leave the shuttle before they were herded down one of those corridors.

Preferably with the luggage, so they weren't separated from the crate.

All those shuttles were built on roughly the same model anyway. Heero nodded slowly as the plan took shape. It wasn't anything complicated, but then something was almost guaranteed to go wrong anyway; it was pointless to add too many variables.

He emptied his carry-on bag on the bed, ignoring the rumpled sheets. Wallet, two changes of clothes, laptop, toiletries, first-aid kit; he traveled light, always had. He opened the back of his laptop, took out the memory card, put the rest on the discarded pile with the clothes and the first-aid kit. The memory card fit inside his wallet, which fit into his gun holster.

The gun itself he discarded as well; it would set off too many detectors. Stealth would serve them better than brute force.

There were things to discard in the wallet itself, but he'd take care of that later. He looked up at Wufei, who after a few seconds watching him was now taking care of his own belongings.

Wufei weighed his own gun in his hand for a moment, thoughtful, and then set it aside as well. Then he looked up at Heero. Heero waited, unable to read any intent on his face, having no idea of what he wanted to say. He hoped it was nothing about how Heero should get out of here and save his own skin.

Or anything about the hair band around his wrist that didn't belong to him.

"... How are your ribs?"

"Fine," he replied automatically. Wufei threw him a quick, doubtful glare. Heero gave a quiet snort of amusement. It was hard getting anything past him. "The bruised area is annoying, but it doesn't hamper my movements." Just made them uncomfortable. What bothered him a little more was the fatigue, but compared to going three days in battle with no sleep it was negligible. Adrenaline would take care of it.

The chiming comm. pulled their eyes away from each other. Time to go. Heero stuck everything he'd taken out in the empty backpack, shouldered it, and went out to join the crowd in the seating area for landing, Wufei on his heels.

Ten minutes. Five. He spent them with his eyes closed, gathering himself.

Thrusters came to life, slowing down the craft, making last-minute corrections to the trajectory. He didn't feel them much from his seat, but the shifting harmonics in their dull roars told him enough.

A soft impact on the hull, two, four, and then the motors went quiet as the station's magnetic clamps guided the shuttle to its assigned dock.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to L2-V0824..."

They waited a few seconds for other passengers to get up before they did the same, using the growing crowd for cover. The flight attendant who had been checking the cabins and bathrooms for stray passengers gave them a look as she passed by, but evidently she believed they were just waiting for the crush to settle down, because she only gave them a quick, polite smile before wading into the fray. She never noticed the heel Wufei had stuck in the door to keep it from closing and locking behind her; two seconds later they were both in the corridor.

The closest bathroom was a cramped place, especially for two people. Heero abandoned his backpack on the sink and went into a crouch, pulling the small screwdriver attached to his keyring out as Wufei leaned on the door to make sure it stayed closed.

The access hatch in the floor was screwed closed, but not tight enough; Heero had it open in less than thirty seconds, and was squeezing his way past tightly-packed machinery five more seconds after that. The light disappeared when Wufei dropped in, pulling the panel shut after them.

At least his Preventers jacket wasn't going to be so easily recognizable when he came out at the other end. He should have thought to pack street clothes; he'd just assumed he'd buy them at a local thrift store, back when he still didn't know kidnapping was in today's plans.

The other panel didn't want to open. He fixed that with a vigorous kick, dropping into the cargo hold face to face with a very startled baggage handler.

"Hey--ghhk."

Heero dragged the man back behind a crate, his forearm compressing the man's throat as Wufei dropped silently beside them. No other employee in sight...

... And his current jacket was still too conspicuous. He started pulling the neon yellow security vest off the unconscious man; it would help him blend in.

"Might as well take his jacket too," Wufei said quietly, so Heero did. It was dark blue and too big for him, but it would do.

He walked out and started carrying luggage toward the conveyer belt, glancing around for Meiran's crate. It was a relief to still find it right-side up.

"Hey, I'd like some help here!" he called in a muffled voice as he pretended to struggle with it. "What the hell did they put in this thing?"

He was turning his back on the exit, so the other man was almost at his side before he realized he didn't recognize Heero; but by then Wufei was behind him. They tucked him in another corner and maneuvered the crate on a trolley.

Heero pretended not to see Wufei's knuckles whitening on the crate. He reached down, and offered the second man's fallen cap in silence. Wufei stared at it for a second, and then sighed curtly like he wasn't pleased to acknowledge Heero had a point. He put it on, tilting the front down to hide his expression.

"It'll keep your hair under control," Heero said, and aimed the trolley at the exit. Wufei snorted, but didn't call him on the transparent attempt to preserve his dignity.

A short corridor led from the inside of the shuttle, through the thick wall separating them from the vacuum surrounding the ship, to the station itself. Things were so busy there, another team of men jostling past them on the ramp as they raced to pick up the luggage. Heero and Wufei didn't speed up, scanning the unloading area for exits.

The place was old; but then again, all of L2 was. Heero was sure the public areas had been revamped, prettied up, but backstage? Dozens of feet overhead he could see exposed beams and harsh lamps, some of them broken and not replaced. The place was huge and full of shadows, and -- yes! They still hadn't installed those security measures that kept all the personnel from just walking from one shuttle area to the next; the only delimitation between their flight's area and the next was a low wall of crates and boxes along a painted line on the floor.

"We're in the commercial flight sector," he told Wufei quietly, "but if we can get far enough there'll be smaller crafts. Some will be smugglers."

Wufei shook his head. "Steal a ride, don't bargain. Less tracks that way."

Heero shrugged. Either way worked for him.

The only problem he could see was the pair of uniformed Preventers standing back where they needed to pass, scanning the crowd. He felt Wufei go tense all over, a crackle of adrenaline right down the spine.

"Move behind that pile, block their line of sight," Heero whispered to him quickly. "Distraction's coming."

A couple of seconds later a call came from the hold; they'd probably found one of the unconscious men. Heero glanced at the Preventers to gauge their reaction. They'd seemed almost bored -- almost like this was just a routine precaution. There would have been more of them if they'd seriously believed their perps were about to escape through there. He needed to see what they'd do now, hoping they'd go and check it out --

"Shit."

One of them was talking fast to someone on the radio, his eye on the developing situation. They both had their hands on their guns. Neither of them was moving away from the only free space wide enough for the trolley to go through.

Smart, Heero acknowledged. Sometimes it was harder to hang back than to rush in, when there were people who might need help. But they seemed determined not to wade in without some more backup.

So he ran to them, waving his hand in the air and looking as alarmed as he knew how. "Hey! Hey -- one of our guys in there --"

"Stop where you are, sir--"

"There's blood everywhere!"

One of the Preventers yelled at him to stop right there, but he was hesitant to pull his gun on what might have been a panicked civilian; Heero dropped to the ground, rolled, and came back up heels first, double-kicking him so hard in the stomach he flew back a couple of steps and crumpled to the floor, retching.

His partner was faster. When Heero landed back on his feet, she had a gun aimed at his chest.

The trolley broadsided her; Heero thought he heard bone breaking. He caught her gun-holding hand and yanked her out of Wufei's way, aiming her toward her partner to cushion her fall and keep him down.

Their cover was pretty much blown now. They raced through the next loading area, and the next, seeing workers jump for cover in front of them. He could see some of the upcoming areas from there. Commercial flight -- another commercial flight -- huge freighter, no -- twenty-seater, too big, and he couldn't see further. They could hear Preventers chasing them, ordering them to stop and drop on the ground.

They were never going to move fast enough to lose them with that trolley. Even the hospital bed hadn't been so awkward; there were precious few handles on the crate and every time they turned too sharply it slid worryingly toward one of the edges.

Heero snatched up a metal tube -- broom handle, probably -- and dropped back to Wufei's level as they ran. "I'll slow them down. Get her out of the crate. Find a smuggler. Meet later."

Wufei's snarled. "Don't say 'meet later'!" His black eyes threw a thunderous glare his way. "Don't lie to me -- don't lie to me!"

"Chang--"

"You won't find me again -- don't know where I'm going--"

Heero leaped over a travel bag and shoved an unwary inspector away, glaring. "Chang!"

If Wufei could have let go of the trolley with even one hand, Heero was sure he would have hit him. "You're not getting caught on purpose, so drop it!"

"I don't _plan_ to get caught," Heero retorted. Wufei snarled again.

"Give me the probability you will."

It was over seventy-five percent, so Heero saved his breath and ran.

He could hear them gaining ground. He shoved boxes down in their path, tables and tools and even workers when those got too close, but it didn't matter; the Preventers were on foot and had no trolley to maneuver; they could dodge and it never slowed them down much.

There were seven of them. That was a bit too much, especially since he wasn't going to allow himself the harshest methods he knew to make sure they _stayed_ down. They just had to tackle him and pile up on top. Unless one of them seriously fumbled it, they'd get him. He wanted to make sure they were too busy with him to chase Wufei, give him some time to extract Meiran from the box. Heero wasn't going to worry about whether that could kill her; she'd been defying the odds for a while now, anyway.

He started to fall back.

"Yuy!"

They were gaining on him. He threw the metal tube at their legs, watching a couple of agents trip. The rest... Not so much.

They were almost up to the smaller craft area -- narrower corridors, worse ceiling lights, more obstacles. If Wufei could take a couple of turns without being seen, he'd manage. Heero planted himself in the narrowest part of the alley and waited.

Something whistled sharp and loud overhead and exploded in a deafening bang. Heero threw himself on the ground and scrambled for cover, noticing the agents doing the same. Rocket bomb? What kind of suicidal idiot was throwing bombs in a spaceport--

\--Since when did bombs melt into showers of green sparks?

He took off running again, almost razing the ground. He knew enough ballistics to tell where the firework had come from. It was probably an accident, or a couple of bored small-time pilots being stupid with their cargo, but if there were more they would make a great distraction...

By then most of the people he saw were salvage ship crew, or possibly much less legal, and most of them watched him run past with whistles and laughter, though they also tended to toy negligently with a random assortment of heavy wrenches and knives to make sure he didn't drag them into his problems. Taking a ship would be a little more difficult than he'd expected...

He turned the next corner to see the landing ramp of a ratty little junker ship clank down on the ground a couple of feet before Wufei's trolley. Wufei had probably been slowing down as soon as he saw it descend, but he still had too much momentum to stop entirely; the trolley's wheel bumped hard on the edge of the ramp and the crate slid halfway off. Wufei threw himself forward to try to hold it there.

Heero was there a second later, putting his own weight on the edge of the crate to keep it from flipping over.

The ship's cargo bay was dark and there was no trace of any crew. Heero clenched his teeth, readied himself for a potential trap, and started wheeling the crate up. Wufei was swearing up a storm beside him, adding his strength to Heero's to push upslope faster. Back at the corner, someone yelled at them to surrender.

They were still in the middle of the ramp when it started lifting closed, and for the last seconds as the slope reversed they had to hold the trolley back to keep it from speeding and crashing on the floor.

The ramp locked, leaving them in almost total darkness. The airlock beeped and swooshed closed.

"He's about to lift off!" Wufei realized, eyes widening. He shoved the trolley forward, unbalancing Heero for a second.

Heero threw a quick look at the darkened cargo bay -- a narrow space, all things considered, but still wide enough for them to get thrown around. It wasn't likely such a small craft would have any gravity. He felt around the wall hurriedly for ropes and nets to secure the crate with, threw the ends at Wufei to lock to the floor, and then the thrusters started purring and he had just barely enough time to find a corner to brace himself in.

The whole ship trembled as the thrusters roared to life, hurtling them out of the space station.

"...If that pilot hasn't bribed the port officials," Wufei said five minutes later, once things had settled down enough that they didn't need to cling to the walls anymore, "I'll eat that cap. The hangar doors should have been closed and asking for permission always takes _ages_."

Heero shrugged and uncurled himself from his tight cling around a pole. "We're not Preventers anymore." Also the stranger had saved them; he was ready to be benevolent. Somewhat. Because unless the rescue had been accidental it was very unlikely their mystery pilot had done it out of the goodness of his heart.

What had been the floor was now a wall as their speed reassigned "down" to the tail end of the ship. The pressure wasn't as strong as true Earth-gravity, though. He watched the crate shift a little in its net, making sure it wasn't moving more than that, and let himself drop to what used to be a wall.

"I'm going. Are you staying here?"

He could see Wufei, faintly, in the lights of the tiny green lights lining the walls. Wufei gave the crate holding his wife a long look, but then squared his shoulders and marched toward the door leading to the rest of the ship.

Heero had assumed he would want to check on her as soon as it was safe -- but then again they didn't know whether it really was. He followed Wufei to the airtight door, noting with approval that the ship seemed in better state on the inside than it had looked when docked, at least where vital equipment was concerned.

They grabbed the rungs and pulled themselves up in the low gravity, checking things out in passing. The trip from the cargo bay was short; there were only a tiny cabin and a tiny bathroom that they both checked for crew -- there wasn't any -- before proceeding to the darkened pilot's cabin.

He was broad-shouldered, with a shoulder blade-length ponytail of wavy, tangled hair; hard to see more with him turned away to face his instruments and the high-backed pilot seat blocking their view. The only lights came from the control panels, flickering green and red and blue.

"Schroedinger's girl still packaged?"

Heero blinked slowly. Wufei stiffened.

"... What the _fuck_ are you doing here."

"Playing taxi, looks like," Duo Maxwell said, and threw them a faintly sarcastic look over his shoulder.

He'd changed, Heero thought -- at least physically. No more baby fat in his cheeks. Stronger jaw line. His bangs now parted in the middle and hung down to his jaws -- he hadn't seen fit to take scissors to them in a while... or a razor to his face in the last week, either.

At his side Wufei was tense, eyes cold and wary. Heero glanced at him, tilted his head in question.

"He's a suspect," Wufei whispered back at him, and then out loud, "How did you know where to find us?"

Duo didn't bother to turn around; he tapped the radio instead. Heero wasn't even surprised to hear a spate of Preventer code out of the speaker.

Heero snorted in faint amusement. He should have expected it. Wufei... Wufei only tensed more.

"Why--"

"Hey, how 'bout we save all the heavy shit for when I'm not trying to keep a bucket of rust in the sky?"

"You could fly this with one hand behind your back in the middle of a firefight," Heero retorted.

Duo gave a short laugh and turned to face him.

There was a white patch of gauze taped over his right eye, covering the entire socket and then some.

"Flattered you trust me so much, but at the moment my depth perception is kinda shitty."

Wufei swore again, though this time it was less from suspicion and more from sheer surprise. Heero was tempted to shove Duo out of his seat, frozen for a second before the words came out. "... Let me pilot."

"Hah! Good try. No. I don't need two eyes to navigate a cleaned corridor. There's not even a speck of dust I could run into here."

Heero crossed his arms. "I'll do the landing. That's not open for debate."

Duo rolled his eyes -- eye? Did he even still have the other one? What the hell had happened to him? "The way you used to pilot, did you ever learn how to land something that's not made of gundanium and can and will break into pieces?"

"Maxwell," Wufei started, and paused as if he wasn't sure what he wanted to say, whether he wanted to be hostile or prod in that slightly rough, competitive way that was still a kind of teasing.

Being Wufei, Heero wasn't surprised to see his eyes harden again.

"Chang," he interrupted quietly. "Let's wait until we're where we're going." There was no point insisting now. Duo was offering them a way out. They'd demand answers afterwards.

"We shouldn't even accept his help without knowing--"

Wufei cut himself off, looked down at his hands, emerging from the sleeves of a jacket he'd stolen. Heero could see the thought right on his face, like a splash of cold water. He was an outlaw too now.

Duo chuckled, low and a little mean. "Still that stick in your ass, huh." He sobered up, or pretended to, eyes still glinting. "Don't worry, we'll talk all we need once we get home. You can explain why there's a brain-dead chick in my cargo bay."

Wufei sneered. Heero shifted his weight to be ready to check him if he decided to reach out and punch Maxwell in the head.

"Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that one."

"And we're looking forward to you explaining a car you stomped flat with people still inside and a whole mafia you slaughtered and, oh, one or two heists and assaults... or perhaps three, or was it thirteen..." The sarcasm in Wufei's voice was so thick he could have choked on it.

Duo looked at him thoughtfully for a second, and then he smirked. "Damn sure I did all that, huh?"

"Damn straight I am."

"Either the two of you shut up or I lock you in the nearest closet," Heero said. "Now where are we going?"

Duo sighed with mock-sadness and turned back to his instruments. "You'll see when we get there." And as Wufei took a sharp breath in annoyance, he smirked once again. "Don't worry, no one will find you. After all, you never found me either."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this is end of part 1, and the beginning of a long-ass hiatus as I try to untangle plot threads and remotivate myself. Argh.


End file.
